Hello again dear void! Are you well?
Operation ‘Tidy Your Bedroom’ continues. (OK I will stop being so bloody cryptic.) Last post was about tidying up the albums. Now some information about the tidy up happening online.
The ManCave, Severed Heads Museum and Music Servers are now all WordPress based. I’d have done that at the beginning had I understood that website =/= WordPress install – I thought I could only have one, and tried to place all the different stages in that. Following this profound insight came the pain of reworking static web pages into templates – which has mostly been good. ManCave particularly has blossomed with updates, even a few fans. Severed Heads is still a little shaky but it’ll get there faster than if I’d still been doing everything in Muse.
I’d like to concentrate this essay on Music Server, which has required some thought. In 1998 the idea was to make a kind of MUZAK streaming server – in 2021 that system has arrived. No big rush in the void. Over the intervening years a bunch of CDs, films, DVDs etc. such that material has already been over exploited. Still keeping the promise.
But the server concept itself is still useful. By creating multiple channels I can come back to an old Old OLD concept I ran back in the 90’s called Sevcom Inflight Entertainment. Each channel has a style – Channel 1 is Muzak, Channel 2 is called ‘Tropical’ at the moment – and there could be more. Tropical could follow on the Barbara Island material. Some other music could be on a third channel. I have decided to call this nmx ✈︎Inflight because I’ve been locked up for almost two years and besides – marketing.
By creating these channels I can continue to create music (as demanded by my mind) without polluting the world with more albums. It reduces the number of plastic bags that my supermarket has been supplying. It allows music to be provided as it is ready rather than being ‘ready or not’.
Here’s the bit where I pretend to be you asking me questions.
Does this mean that there will no longer be new albums? Very likely it does, because you have voted by not buying new albums. You have said you only want old albums in impressively expensive cardboard sleeves and who am I to argue.
What if I want to own this material? Let’s just get it running first and and see if that’s even an issue. It gives me time to make a bunch of things and kill off the bad ones.
Why not just do radio shows and podcasts? Good question – a well done radio show is actually a big task – an hour of music is no small achievement, so better to add material as it is ready. Maybe the occasional podcast is a good idea. I will learn.
Why not just use YouTube or Spotify or …? There is the potential to develop this project if I can make the rules. Sure, I might get more hits on these sites, but aren’t you sick of everything being ad-driven?
Why does it have to play random tracks? That’s a feature of the MUZAK design. You can turn off shuttle and it then plays them in order.
Didn’t Brian Eno announce a similar thing a short while ago? Yeah he did. I announced Sevcom Inflight about 20 years ago but then maybe when a ‘real’ musician joins an idea, it makes you feel like you’re not so dumb after all.
