Intercontinental Music Lab » barney.brown

The War Is On

barney.brown — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:26:27 +0000

We’ve just launched the blog for our next album The Intercontinental Music Lab Goes To War. We’ve also got a tremendous list of people taking part this time round including (so far):

KELLY HOGLUND/w-TIM DONDEREVO
GREG DEAN
BENJAMIN ARNTZEN
MATT FLAHERTY
JULIAN PETERS
BARNEY BROWN
LAYLA VAN
THOM LYNE (Seventy Seven)
DAN WALDKIRCH
JIM SMITH
LUCIANO VARGAS
OLI HAYHURST
NEIL PARFIT
FLIGHT OF BIRDMAN (Richard Yates and Nik Osbourne)
SAM BERRY
KIP LOADES
ROB FISHER
SEB ROBERTS
JOE DEAN
ASH (Joseph Ashley-Smith)

Cripes what a squad. This one might have to be a double album.

I hope you’re all liking the new website

barney.brown — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:26:52 +0000

There’s a bunch more stuff we want to do with it including more map based fun on the track pages, and a collabaration-ometer which shows who’s collaborated with who, and how much.

One of the things that’s great about playing with creative stuff like the music, art and exploration of the IML and the wonders of the web, is that new exciting ways of presenting stuff arise.

Ingredients to play with include the people in the band, the subjects they write about, who they write with, where they are, and what they blog about. What we’re going to try to do with this site is look for interesting ways of knitting all this together in obvious/not so obvious ways so hopefully you can all enjoy exploring this wonderful project. Now back to the code! Do comment if you’ve got any bright ideas about what sorts of things you’d like to see. We’re going to be pestering all the band for mugshots soon so you can see what we all look like. Radical.

Chang and Eng Bunker

barney.brown — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:56:27 +0000

Why not get a tattoo of your chosen theme?

barney.brown — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:53:00 +0000

Hi. I’m adopting a new technique this time round. Thanks to my friend Rich, the chord sequence for the song has been created for me. Rich told me on the phone the other night he wrote the chords on a piece of paper whilst his guitar was just out of reach, so he’s never even heard what they sound like when played. This style and approach is of course, right up my street.

So I’m going to play around them (Rich urges me to apply some smooth jazz stylings and given our subject matter – Spontaneous Human Combustion, I think, ahem, some spontaneity would be VERY apt).

I was always a really big fan of Oli’s backing track for what became Know It Now on Superheroes Of Science so I might plunder the depths of the synth wash (again). Having said that, all of the tracks I’ve written so far have started in one style, been trashed, been written in another style, been trashed, then cobbled together near the last minute.

My research into SHC so far has revealed that nearly all sufferers of this appalling condition were found either with their heads in the grates of fire places, or next to bar heaters. Far be it for me to try and explain the unexplained but I am ALREADY beginning to sense a connection between … conventional sources of heat … and … people being set on fire. Clearly I need to dig deeper. Why the fast burning? Why so intense? Why? I can’t wait to explore the possible causes of ignition, through the power of SYNTHESIZERS.

Things that like to go boom

barney.brown — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:48:00 +0000

I can’t get spontaneous combustion out of my head. Those black and white photos of people, lying in fireplaces, boots, devoid of humans, small piles of ashes. What happened, wha happen? That instantaneous and unexplained transformation from bellied, flesh wielding humanoid to flaming HOT HOT piles. I think there’s some beautiful simplicity in there, what was happening in the lives of those people before they seemingly blew up in their living rooms? Did they manage to feed the cat? Did they pay their gas bills? What caused the heat? Wha? Wha? Wha happen? And more importantly, as someone writing a backing track to accompany the subject, what would it sound like. All I can say is that I’m trying to secure the services of a flute and a banjo to convey the sonic impression. Good luck all.

Just the stats man

barney.brown — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:45:46 +0000

Ancient Greeks & Circus Freaks has now been released. Just in time to light up your Christmas Tree with musical tales like you’ve never heard before. One of the things I’ve started doing having released new albums is looking at the stats of how many people have been downloading them and where they come from. I’ve mentioned Mininova before where you can download all of our albums for free. I’ve now set up a monitoring thing in Yahoo Pipes which counts how many times our stuff has been downloaded. I haven’t got it to add everything up yet but you can do that right? So here is my album downloader counter thingammy (at the moment it only counts downloads from Mininova, we have about 15,000 other downloads elsewhere):

It’s here

barney.brown — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 12:24:00 +0000

You can now listen to Ancient Greeks & Circus Freaks.

What a journey it’s been getting here. Lots of excitement along the way, and for my money, some of the best music we’ve created yet. I can’t say much more at the moment as I’m hurtling around the internet spraying copies of the album left right and centre. If you see me passing, squirt some water in my mouth. In fact, the running I’m doing now is part of a relay team, an incredible international relay team. The baton has been with Tim in America where, as always, he’s had the I suspect scary task of finishing off all of your amazing work. I know he takes this job very seriously and I think you’ll hear the care he’s taken again with what you’ve all done.

New member Benjamin is already working on seeding the albums out to the Torrent sites, meaning we’re in a real chance of getting 100,000 copies of our various albums downloaded by the end of 2009. What an insane way to end the decade (right at the last minute as well).

I can’t say well done enough to you all.

Lily Allen didn't peer to peer into this crystal ball

barney.brown — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 23:52:36 +0000

Peer to peer sharing of music is killing the record industry and making it impossible for new acts to get any kind of exposure or help. That’s not quoting Lily Allen but that was the crux of her attack on music piracy. Peer to peer sharing of music enabled 60,000 copies of our albums to be downloaded in under a month. I’d like to see a record company sell that many copies of one of our excellent CDs with a zero budget.

We’ve been giving our music away for free for over a year now, and been having great fun doing so. We’ve made new friends, pushed ourselves creatively, and haven’t ended up out of pocket (unlike a lot of touring signed bands).

We were doing quite well distributing MP3s on our site as a downloadable zip file, and some lossless versions of the albums via Mediafire. Then Zorlin-cc started seeding our stuff on Mininova. Mininova is/was a very popular site for picking up torrent files. Torrent files facilitate the peer to peer sharing of files, distributing the bandwidth of downloading amongst users rather than just the creators of the files. Anyway, on the 26th November Mininova was taken to court and forced to remove all the illegal content from its servers. Leaving just the legal stuff. Suddenly our albums became needles in not such a big haystack and bingo, thousands of new people discovered our music.

So peer to peer can help independent bands distribute their music, as can Jamendo, Last.FM, and begrudgingly MySpace (I say begrudgingly because I’m not sure MySpace has been particularly creative with its offering). OK, we’re not trying to make money from the Intercontinental Music Lab so we can increase downloads.

So how do you make a living out of writing and distributing music via Creative Commons licenses? We could look into it, but what would do with the cash? There are now about 30 people in the band, people who write what they want, or decide not to if they’ve got other commitments, and there’s no pressure.

I’ve got to go to bed now. Sorry if that was all a bit incoherent, I do have a cold you see.

Big album covers and cool stuff for free

barney.brown — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 09:49:16 +0000

OK so we’re making baby steps but the core content of the website has now been pulled over to this new site. It’s already proving a lot easier to maintain and customise so we’re really going to be able to start doing some more groovy things now.

I’ve added in some nice huge images for the albums. It always seemed a shame that all that lovely artwork was just shown off as smallish thumbnail so now they’re big and brash.

Sorting out the theming has been a lot easier this time round as the guy who put together the WordPress theme lets you download his original PSD file for modding. What a nice chap. Very much in keeping with IML philosphy as well (though we’d rather you didn’t cut our music up, you are welcome to lay it over the top of videos, podcast it, just don’t try and make any money out of it alright).

Moving over to WordPress

barney.brown — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:03:19 +0000

We’ve been using Drupal for almost a year now and although it’s been quite flexible with regards to how we build our site, we ended up using lots of custom components, which haven’t been able to keep up with Drupal core updates. This has resulted in the site breaking quite regularly. So we’re decamping to a generic install of WordPress and wringing everything we can out of it. So far so good. We’re just copying and pasting all of our old content across then we’re going to look into how we can get songs and aritsts linking into each other intelligently. Also going to rethink the style with an emphasis on ease of navigation rather than giant splodges everywhere.