solipsistic NATION: A/V

Happy New Year!

I hope you had fun bringing in 2010 because 2009 sure was a bitch, wasn’t it?

For today’s New Year edition of the Small World I was going to do a segment on Steampunk. The show was going to feature an interview with Bruce Sterling, who along with William Gibson, pushed Steampunk into the mainstream with their novel, The Difference Engine. We were also going to talk with David Simkins, one of the writers and executive producers of the Syfy channel’s Warehouse 13 and also talk to Steampunk Tales Evelyn Kriete.

Unfortunately, what with the holidays and work I wasn’t able to get around to editing all of those interviews. My fault, really. I could have easily done a show just featuring one of those people but no, I have to turn it into a grand project!

My apologies but I will have the Steampunk segment ready for you in two weeks.

In the meantime, I’m going to repodcast one of shows I produce called solipsistic NATION.

On solipsistic NATION I play the best of all genres of electronic music and I often interview musicians and music labels and other people from the electronic music community. If NPR did a show about electronic music I imagine it would sound exactly like solipsistic NATION.

I’m quite proud of the show. I took everything I learned from producing the Small World and applied it to solipsistic NATION. What’s cool is now I’m taking everything I’ve learned from producing solipsistic NATION to the Small World.

The show from solipsistic NATION you’re going to hear today was actually released October 16th of 2009 and features interviews with Amy Grill, director of Speaking in Code, Paul Owens, director of Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, Hannes Stöhr, director of Berlin Calling, Katyá Guseva, editor of Big Up Magazine, Graham St. John, editor of Dancecult and Fernando Fonseca, founder of Public Spaces Lab.

As I said, I’m proud of solipsistic NATION and I’m particularly proud of this episode.

If you like what you hear then why don’t you go to solipsisticnation.com and subscribe to the show. This week on solipsistic NATION I interview John and Paul Healy from Somatic Responses and play music from one of their live sets.

Okay, enough out of me. Here’s the show show. I hope you like it!

A/V

Today on solipsistic NATION we’ll talk with Amy Grill about her documentary, Speaking in Code. We’ll also talk to Paul Owens, the director of Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet, a documentary about the Chiptunes movement. On the night of the debut of Berlin Calling in Hollywood, director Hannes Stöhr shares his thoughts about his new movie. From the big screen to the pages of Big Up Magazine, we’ll talk to Katyá Guseva about bass driven music, art and culture and Big Up Magazine‘s one year anniversary. We’ll also talk to Graham St. John about the newly launched Dancecult journal. Finally, Fernando Fonseca, the founder of the Public Spaces Lab, shares with us his experiences at the Net Audio Festival in Berlin.

Speaking in Code Speaking in Code is an intimate account of people who are completely lost in music and is a heartbreaking and lighthearted documentary, it’s a vérité glimpse into the world of techno. Speaking in Code stars Modeselektor, Wighnomy Brothers, Monolake, Philip Sherburne, David Day and Amy Grill.

Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet is a feature length documentary which delves into the movement known as chiptunes, a vibrant underground scene based around creating new, original music using old video game hardware. Familiar devices such as the Nintendo Game Boy and Nintendo Entertainment System are pushed in new directions with startling results.Using New York as a microcosm for a larger global movement, Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet maps out the genesis of the first annual Blip Festival, a four day celebration of over 30 international artists exploring the untapped potential of low-bit video game consoles. With floor-stomping rhythms and fist-waving melodies, trailblazers of the chiptune idiom descend upon Manhattan to pen a new chapter in the history of electronic music.

Berlin Calling is about electronic music composer Martin (Paul Kalkbrenner), known as DJ Ickarus, is touring with his manager and girlfriend Mathilde (Rita Lengyel) from club to club around the globe and is about to release their biggest album to date. However, all of his plans are thrown out of kilter after Ickarus is submitted to the emergency ward of a psychiatric clinic high on drugs after a gig- A tragicomedy in Berlin of today. Berlin Calling is directed by Hannes Stöhr who has also directed One Day in Europe (Berlinale 2005 in Official Competition) and Berlin is in Germany (Berlinale 2001 Panorama Audience Award).

Big Up Magazine is a magazine dedicated to bass driven music, art, culture and people and celebrates its one year anniversary October 24th at the Paradise Lounge in San Francisco with Cyrus/Random Trio, Cluekid featuring Aurorah, Kutz, Samiyam and Darkiside of Get Darker TV.

Dancecult is a peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal for the study of electronic dance music culture and has launched the 1.1 edition 1.1 published and available at http://dj.dancecult.net.

The Net Audio Festival ’09 took place from the 8th to the 11th of October and gathered the international netaudio community for a four-day music and conference festival in Berlin, under the title “East meets West.” 2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Iron Curtain. Net Audio Festival ’09 recalled pictures of hands reaching out to pull people from both sides up onto the Berlin wall. The event will took place at Maria, a venue situated immediately on the former Berlin ‘death strip’ once dividing the city and the world into eastern and western hemispheres.

That’s the show! Join us again next week when we’ll do it all over again. But completely different.

Photo Credit: Mitch Vega