Part of the idea is to finish as much as possible within the 3-day recording session, and not to spend weeks afterwards editing video and mixing tunes. But I don’t think it’s going to lend itself to a live broadcast (most of the time we’ll probably be plugging things in and thinking). What we need is a curated archive of video and audio footage, without having to do too much curation…

Associative vernacular whuh?!

It just so happens that I was reading a blog post by Andrew Dubber the other day called Music and associative vernacular media, in which he describes an event at which he did exactly this. A bunch of musicians were brought together to write, rehearse and perform some music over a few days, and it was all documented online by giving the performers Flip cameras and asking them to “point them at whatever they thought was interesting”. Their short video clips (between 30 seconds and 3 minutes each) were uploaded to a blog throughout the day, given a title and tagged with roughly predefined keywords. In this way you can build a simple video archive that the audience can explore:

Because what’s interesting is not the video itself, but the way in which that video potentially links to other, related videos from within the same context – and makes connections from which narrative meaning can be constructed.

Call it associative vernacular mediation.

So you might see a short video of me talking about an idea for a Hammond riff, and when it’s finished you could follow a number of links – to other videos of me talking, other videos featuring the Hammond, or other videos related to that song. There’s no fixed way of exploring, you just watch whatever catches your eye. Like Dubber says, it’s an interesting way of “making internet”.

Rather than make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the project, or subject the musicians to a Big Brother-style reality show production, the aim was to use the more conversational, rough-and-ready ‘vernacular’ attributes of the world wide web – and, for that matter, allow them to select what should and shouldn’t be filmed.

Wait a minute – who’s dream are we in?

I’m using Dubber’s idea to solve a practical problem, but it’s very interesting to think about it from a higher, more academic, level. If you’re at all interested in this sort of conversation, you should definitely follow Dubber. He’s a clever dude:

This project is, in part, intended as a provocation and exploration toward what a natively ‘read-write’ form of music mediation might be in the digital environment. And while it could be argued (and often is) that this sort of technological intervention ‘devalues’ music, or that the deprioritisation of a controlled, ordered, finished and idealised definitive product constitutes a form of cultural net loss, that proposition does have an air of nostalgia to it, and also asserts an ideal form of mediation that is always problematic and conservative.

I would argue, as a form of media communication itself, rather than simply something that requires mediation, music (and the activity of making music) is not simply a fixed artistic expression, but a very human activity – a set of practices, shared symbolic meanings and discourses that connect people: the people making the music as well as the people for whom the music is performed.

I’m getting excited about this project now (can you tell? ;), and it’s going to be great fun seeing how (and if) Nick and Spence get into the online side of things. Xander is coming along in his usual role as genius behind-the-scenes producer, which should ease the pressure. After all, we are there to make music!

There will be a Tumblr to collect all the videos, and follow me, Nick and Spence for the inside scoop. I imagine we’ll be hashtagging everything #dogsrunningfree too.

Here is the incredible new music video made by my friend, the director Simon Ratigan for the song “All My Life”, from my new album “Set It Free” (Released on my label Unlit Records and available now from www.jontnet.com). It is made from 100,000 photos taken of people Simon met wandering through the desert and in the Los Angeles area and then rendered together to make a moving image. The use of a stills camera means it was incredibly painstaking to make but the visual result is quite extraordinary. Hope you like it.

Watch it full screen and in HD if you can. The effect of full quality stills in motion is very cool:

Part 1: Arriving

Part 2: Them Crooked Vultures Soundcheck

Part 3: Little Fish Soundcheck

Part 4: Little Fish set (the first bit)

Part 5: Little Fish set (the last bit)

Creative people are always busy

Although I’ve known Nick since the early nineties and enjoy his company immensely, we consistently fail to see much of each other. It may be because he doesn’t really like me, but I doubt it. I’m optimistic like that. It’s probably because we’re both creators of stuff, writers and musicians. We both go through life with a neverending mental list of projects, plans and ideas that will get us one step closer to being creatively successful. Creative success is a ridiculous goal, because it has no end. If you were ever to reach it (and you’d have to have a narrow definition of success to get there), you would be inspired, forced and driven to do more. So it’s not a goal at all. We don’t want to waste valuable creative time until we’ve finished, but there’s no end. So we don’t really have time for each other.

The solution to this antisocial quandary wasn’t difficult to find. We want to see each other more and we want to create stuff. So let’s see each other and create stuff. But what kind of stuff? Music doesn’t work. Nick creates beautiful music that makes you sink into a melancholy thoughtful state and I create geeky music that makes you smile. The last time Nick and I collaborated on a musical project was back in 1999 when we made an album called Groove On, which stands as the singular most embarrassing record either of us have ever made.

We’re making a videocast

All we really wanted to do was meet up and chat. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re making a videocast called The Peoples Princess (after a Diana commemorative mug with a missing apostrophe that I took to the session) in which we chat. We made a theme tune with a ukulele and an autoharp that Nick had lying around, and we filmed some short clips of toys being pushed over to break up the talking.

The Peoples Princess isn’t supposed to be funny (which is lucky, because we’re generally not). It’s just two self-involved but loveable chaps catching up for a chat. With beer. And a sofa. The wonderful and talented Daley Walton is editing it, so if it ends up being funny it’s his fault. Daley is also the special guest in the first episode. He doesn’t really say much or appear on camera, but he’s pretty special.

The Peoples Princess #1: Twenty-Ben. Nerve tonics. Sleeves. Television.

Here it is. Share it with anyone you think might like it. You can fave it on YouTube or subscribe to the peoplesprincesstv YouTube channel, share it on Facebook, tweet it, follow it on Tumblr or just email the link to your friends. Hope you enjoy it. ;)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sunshine Beauty – a geek summer anthem from Ben Walker on Vimeo.

I’ve had this song kicking around in various states since before Christmas, but since today felt like the first day of summer I decided to finish it off. I let my email subscribers see it yesterday as a special treat (I’ve been sending them a weekly email about social media and music).

I’ll be playing it for the first time at Ben’s Big Gig next Friday! ;)

Ben’s Big Gig posters

The highlight has been the beautiful new gig posters. Nick Gill printed them by hand (on a proper old-school letterpress), and blogged about it. Xander and I then spent a pleasant afternoon pottering around North Oxford and charming our way into the most bizarre shop windows.

Still rehearsing

We’re still hammering out the details of the set and coming up with quirky and amusing vocal harmonies to lift the arrangements to a new level of pop genius. Here’s a little treat from the phone camera archives:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Working out the Ballad of the I.T. Guy from Ben Walker on Vimeo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I was going to include a load of explanatory photos to add to the comedy effect but I couldn’t bring myself to detract from the pure rural beauty of the raw footage, so I’ll explain here. Firstly, for those of you who don’t know who Hugh is:

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (born 14 January 1965) is a British celebrity chef, television presenter and “real food” campaigner, known for his back-to-basics philosophy.

On television, Fearnley-Whittingstall’s reputation is that of a eccentric chef. Initial exposure came in Cook on the Wild Side, an exploration of earthy cuisine. His habit of “picking up roadkill and eating the hedgerows [...] earned him his nickname of Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall”. He followed this with the series TV Dinners, during an episode of which he notoriously flambéed and puréed a human placenta which was served as a pâté and “much enjoyed by the baby’s family and friends”.

from Wikipedia

I was introduced to Hugh by my friend Rowan, who recently appeared out of the blue on the Channel 4 reality holiday show Shipwrecked. Back when we were in a band together, Rowan used to bring bags of videos to the studio and make us all watch alternating episodes of River Cottage and Ultimate Wrestling, in which fighters from every discipline would be pitched against each other in a battle to the death. Or so it seemed. Lucky for me, I repressed all memories of Ultimate Wrestling until recently and instead concentrated on the rural, organic idealism of the Hugh.

There’s a line in the song that says “he grows PSB in the shade of a tree”. If you haven’t tried locally grown Purple Sprouting Broccoli, you haven’t lived:

I also mention that Hugh can tell his woodcock from his snipe. Can you?:

And while we’re at it, to pass the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall chicken test, can you tell the difference between battery farmed and free range chicken?:

That’s probably enough quasi-educational rambling for now. I hope you enjoyed the song and the video. And if you happen to run into Hugh in your local Tesco car park, be sure to tell him about it…

[thanks Flickr for the Creative Commons licensed photos. Click the images for originals.]

Of course sometimes things are actually finished. Like the five songs I put on last.fm yesterday under the title “I Hate Mornings Vol. 1″:http://www.last.fm/music/JB+Walker/I+Hate+Mornings+Vol.+1. They’re good to go. Fully baked. Done.

h3. It’s all about Tenpower.

So the new song is cool. Poppy (as in the genre, not the flower). Simple. Effective. It’s called Ten. Want to know why? I’ll tell you. I was reading cvs2bvs: software for your brain from the “School Of Thinking”:http://www.schoolofthinking.org, and came across the concept of Tenpower, which is “the deliberate or habitual use of the number 10″ as a way of imposing an arbitrary system of measurement on a situation. The idea is that you can always aim for a situation that is “ten times better” even if you can’t measure the initial situation.

Applying tenpower to a fraught relationship, we find our hero desperately trying to prove his love (on paper) by working out how many times better things are now that he is with his lady. As I’m sure you’re all aware, this isn’t really what girls are looking for when they ask you to prove your love. As usual, the solution is not to look for a solution (even if you can prove it on paper), but to think “outside the box”:http://www.schoolofthinking.org/how-sot-training/lateral-thinking/ and go for the age old three pronged attack of Understanding, Validation and Emotional Support. But that’s for another song. You’ll have to make do with some amusing facial expressions for now…

h3. Video

Click here to view the embedded video.