Indigenous Radio

[ryan]

Jeff, that cassette-style degausser you found is exactly what I've got.

[chris]

ryan said:

I had never heard "The Eclipse" by Darren and the Minorities until today. Wow, what a hilarious tune. I love how you guys were experimenting with tape-speed and silly spoken-word vocals.

Experimenting with tape speed? What the hell are you talking about? That song is normal speed, and I resent your insinuation that we cheated.

Okay... maybe not... 8^)

[chris]

Please, for the love of god, take "That One Song (Still Life)" off of rotation. Any outsider who was enjoying any of the music on Rose Rock would immediately turn the station as soon as the lyrics started.

[chris]

And while we're at it... take off Future Perfect, for the love of Christ. That song is just awful (at least the singing is). Ugh.

[Guest Justin]

Yeah, I agree with Chris about Future Perfect. Awful offal. But I've always liked Darren's tranquil acoustic stylings on That One Song. If you listen really closely, you can hear me making cream of onion soup in the background on the guitar track and me eating said soup in the background of the vocal track. The soup was good, friends, but it took a long time to cook. You have to boil the onion long enough to be able to pierce it with just the weight of a fork. I think I boiled it for like two hour or so. I wouldn't ever make it again, I don't think.

[jtmx1]

Okay, I've removed both of those songs. But I've gotta say, I kinda like them, especially Still Life. I think it is the ambiguity of that phrase...

[rannad nayr]

I love the soup story. We need more songs about the preparation of soup. ;-)

[Jeff]

One of the things I love about listening to our old stuff over and over is hearing the real gems outside of their usual context. Today, my song is Harmonica Fun. It is so plaintive and sad. It expresses such wistful longing. I love it's sad saunter. The rhythm guitar isn't perfect in its timing, but I can hear what it means. And the harmonica isn't fun at all. It is dirge-like and driven with nails. Such a wonderful finish. I know Justin and David had a hand in this. According to the liner notes most of the harmonica part was trashed in the mix. And that is exactly as it should be. Whoever edited this song is a genius.

Again, I am amazed by you guys.

Jeff

[Jeff]

I finally get what gets me about the lyrics for the shorter version of Iris. It’s this combination:

“Looking for something SHE had written years before…”
“I came upon a photograph and forgot what I was looking for.”

There is a move from the third person to the first. And the move is—it must be—facilitated by a second person YOU. This understood you is not only interesting in its own right but constitutes the understood essence of the song. And it is thrice hidden: from the speaker in her papers, from the audience in its listening, and from the lyric itself since it is never mentioned. The song cries out YOU and never says it. It reminds me of one of my favorite poems:

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

-- James Leigh Hunt

I wrote a variation of this in 1993 that tried to bring out the irony:

Jenny kiss'd me wide awake,
Kiss'd many men she once knew;
Time, good thief! transforming all ache
that meets your gaze, take that too.
Say I'm happy, say I feel
All the life that joyfully bliss'd me;
Say I'm full content, but still-- Jenny kiss'd me!

[Jeff]

Hey guys,

I would really like to have another Friday Night Featured Performer. Is anyone willing to send me enough of their stuff so that I could put it on an all night loop and laugh and cry about how cool you are?

Okay, I promise not to write anything in excess of your talent. But on Fridays I often feel like looking back a little, and I would appreciate any help you might be willing to provide.

Jeff

[chris]

Wait... who did "Harmonica Fun"... I don't remember how it goes...

Jeff: is there any way I can access the songs on the radio? I won't fiddle with them, but I'd like to download an MP3 of "Thing in the Sea" so I can perhaps record the vocals to it.

I've been looking through the old tapes for "Forest Fire," the raucous pyro song that my brother Andrew and I wrote long ago. Also, I need to find "Falls Creek," the song about the hormone-filled X-ian camp. "Where is the virgin when I need her?"

[jtmx1]

Chris, if you are going to use the file for vocals, then you want the wav file not the mp3. I have all of my recently ripped D&M wavs and I would like to share them.

Here's what I am thinking: If I figured out how to turn my PC into a radio in just a few hours, I bet I could make it into an FTP server pretty easily, too. That would give everyone access to anything they want off my harddrive. It would also be the way to go for real audio collaboration over the net, which Justin and Ryan have talked about with me.

Let me look into it.

Jeff

[jtmx1]

Okay, this is what I am thinking about using: filezilla

sourceforge.net/projects/filezilla/

Anyone heard anything bad about it?

[Jeff]

I think I've just about got FTP going. I would really like someone to check it for me in a 1/2 hour or so, to see if it is working for you. Anyone willing to help me out?

Jeff

[Jeff]

I think I got it! Anybody want a file? The login is "indigenet" and the password is that langauge Justin created.

Oh, and here is the indigenous ftp server: 68.203.212.90:8000/

Yeah, it's the radio station with ftp in front instead of http

[Jeff]

Seems to be working just fine.

[Jeff]

Keep in mind that you can really mess these files up with a decent ftp client. You could even add files to my machine with some of them. So be careful how you handle the files; don't delete them or anything.

I will probably only leave the server up till 10 pm. This is quite a bit more dangerous than the radio station for my PC, so I am going to be a little more careful.

[ryan]

Alright, crew. I just got my Paypal account converted over to serve as the Rose Rock Radio operations-fund account. Most of you have probably used Paypal before (I know Jeff and Justin are familiar with it). But here's the gist, if you want to donate to the operations fund for the radio station, but aren't sure how:

1) Go to www.paypal.com.
2) Sign-into your Paypal account. If you don't already have one, you must create one to send money through this service. Yeah, I know that sucks, but on the upside, these accounts are free of charge, and are great to have if you like to purchase stuff through online auction sites, or if you ever need to send money to internet-savvy friends. If you do have to create a new account, you'll need to associate a bank account or credit-card account with it; Paypal will lead you through this process.
3) Click the "send money" tab at the top of your account page.
4) In the box labeled "Recipient's Email or Phone," type-in my email address: [e-mail].
5) Donate whatever amount you feel comfortable donating.
6) Submit.

Really, that's all you gotta do. It's pretty easy. Paypal wires the money out of your bank account or credit card account, then deposits it into the Indigenous Productions / Rose Rock Radio account. I will withdraw the money into my Tulsa Teachers Credit Union checking account only as needed to fund the operation of the radio station. Notably, there is no service fee or transfer-charge associated with any part of this process; that's one thing that's pretty cool about Paypal.

So, go ahead and make your donation, Jeff, and anyone else who's ready. I'm now gonna look into getting the Live365 site up and operational.

[ryan]

Okay, here's a link to the accounts offered by Live365:

store.live365.com/orders/orderform.live

I'm thinking we should start with the P100 account for $14.95 a month. This would translate to $179.40 for the year. That's $89.70 per person if two people share the cost, $59.80 if three people share the cost, and $44.85 if four people share the cost. This is, of course, assuming that everyone contributes equally, which is a hypothetical assumption.

So, what do you guys think? Does the P100 account sound good? Should we get something cheaper? Should we step-up to the next most expensive account? Check the website and give me your thoughts. And know that we can always change our account-type later if we find it doesn't suit us for whatever reason.

[ryan]

By the way, I wanted to mention that I told my "friend/musical accomplice" Noam Faingold about the radio station, and he was pretty interested. I encouraged him to give me some of his recordings to put online. His first question was, "How much does it cost?" He'd thought maybe we were charging to broadcast music, and he'd been willing to pay some small fee. I told him it was free for now, and that we were planning on supporting the station's overhead through donations. But Noam's assumption that we would charge for broadcasting suggested some interesting possibilities which hadn't ocurred to me.

========

Here's something that occurred to me in light of this: I've been planning on telling all my friends about the station, and having all the musicians I know contribute tracks. The idea, for me, has been simple: Get as many people to participate as possible, and your listener base will grow exponentially. I mean, every musician has his own family and circle of friends. So, the more musicians we can get interested in the station -- the more people we can get contributing -- the more listeners we'll get. And, moreover, the more interesting the station will become. I'd love to tune-in and hear a Justin McBride song followed by a Rewake tune, followed by one of Jeff's numbers, followed by 20-Minute-Crash, followed by some band I've never heard before that Chris signed-up.

Ah, but there's a rub to this: The more tracks we put in rotation, the more space we'll need. The more listeners we get, the more bandwith we'll need. Which means we'll eventually need a bigger account. So, I'm just thinking here, but I wanted to put the idea out for debate:

Would we ever want to consider charging a small fee for people to air their music on our station? I know none of us feels this is the right thing to do right now. But, what if the station was growing to the point where we needed to upsize our account, and no one besides us was making donations? Surely we wouldn't just say to everyone, "Sorry, but we can't afford to upsize our account, deal with it." Would we, at that point, then consider instating a fee?

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You know, feel free to ignore this posting; maybe it's not helpful to think about this kind of stuff this early in the game. I'm just tired and I'm tweaking-out about this bullshit. I need to go to bed. I'll post these thoughts anyway, just in case there's something of value in them.