Subscribe by email
![[oliver] music in greensboro](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2403/2497180463_2af308cf89.jpg)
The [Oliver] guys gave me this flyer a few weeks back at the kick-off DMP show. While the kids are celebrating moving on to the real word — man, they’ll have no idea how ironic that celebration is until they’re out a few years — I’ll be scouting the show for future DMP acts.
So if you have the time, come on by.
Andrew Dudek — singer/guitarist of Dawn Chorus, former proprietor of Gate City Noise (RIP) and the founder of The Beard and Moustache Club of North Carolina — has a radio show this summer:
Peoples,
I wanted to tell each and everyone of y’all of my new summer Radio Show, as if I didn’t have 1 million things on my plate already. The show is called “The Punk and Soul Radio Show”. The concept of alternating Punk and Soul came from a mixtape that Zach Blue made in our high school days. Pure genius. Anyway, the show starts this Monday night (the 19th) at 11pm to 1am. For all those who live out of town you can stream it. Just look for the live stream heading at the top of the page. Listening to music is a big part of my life and playing some of favorite hits for you gives me great joy. I hope you all can find the time to tune in for a song or two.
Thanks,
Andrew k Dudek
I’m not a huge radio listener, but I’ll definitely catch a few of these puppys. You gotta respect the passion Andrew brings to everything he touches.
Not enough Greensborians realize that our city held such an instrumental action during the Civil Rights Movement. On February 1, 1960, four African American students, from NC A&T State University, sat at a segregated lunch counter in the downtown Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth’s store on Elm Street. Little did they know that their actions would create a sit-in movement which spread to 15 cities in 9 states in only a couple of months.
As part of Greensboro’s Bicentennial celebration playwright Ed Simpson was commissioned to create a performance around the Greensboro sit-ins. Rather than focusing on the 4 who took the amazing first step in the sit-ins the play, Periphery, expresses the thoughts and feelings of everyone else surrounding the event. Students, business owners, black, white, young and old - each displays their perspective while acting out factually based events.
Last night the play officially opened downtown at the Greensboro Historical Museum (130 Summit Avenue) and will continue running May 15, 16 and 17 at 8:00 PM and Sunday May 18 at 2:00 PM. Adult tickets are $20, seniors $18 and all students are FREE. You can call 333-SHOW (7469) for tickets and visit the Community Theatre of Greensboro site for more information. It’s about 1 hour and 30 minutes long, fun, enlightening, humorous, fast-moving and quite uplifting. This photo shown above is from the opening night performance of Periphery which had actual chairs/stools from the Woolworth’s counter that were part of the Greensboro sit-ins. The chairs were graciously lent to add richness to the performance.
Please see the show and remember the incredible events that happened in our community less than 50 years ago. It’s an eye opening perspective and helps us appreciate where we are today. Personally, I was excited to realize that my running route goes along the same path that 1000+ NC A&T students marched down Market Street to participate in the sit-in movement.
(photograph by Dan Bayer)
Serving, mixing, recording, crafting and shaping Triad musicians one act at a time. That would be Danny Bayer.
Dan is also a Photojournalism student Randolph Community College in Ashboro, NC. A rockin’ self-portrait, no?
I know how very lucky we are to have Dan serve as sound engineer extraordinaire on the dotmatrix project. Thanks again, man.
[photograph by Michael Dunn]
Above is the working cover for the 14 track live album we recorded last month at The Green Burro for the Greensboro-based, Southern Rock, alt-Americana group, The Radials. Our featured act on opening night, Sorry About Dresden, will have their 10 track live album finished sometime this upcoming week.
Each band we put on receives a live album, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered in downtown Greensboro. We record live on 6 to 8 separate channels — depending on the amount of vocal mics and mic’d instruments needed — through our Mackie Onyx 1620 w/ a Firewire card straight to Pro Tools on our MacBook Pro. Dan “Mixmaster” Bayer, our resident sound engineer, has been mixing both live and in the studio for years with outstanding quality.
Once the album is complete, we license it with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. It basically means that anyone can use the music, even remix or sample it, as long as they give proper attribution and don’t use it commercially. Of course individual cases of copyright permission can still be managed individually, so the artists have complete control of their product.
Our distribution plan is where we shift away from the traditional label route — not to say that we consider ourselves or strive towards being a “label” on any decipherable level. Each album will be uploaded to the Internet Archive, where fans can download the tracks for free. We’ll also work with artists to get their albums out to spots such as Last.fm, iLike and AmieStreet while schooling them on how their fans can help them in the internet age by doing simple, free things like scrobbling tracks to their Last.fm account when using iTunes or their iPod, tagging tracks, recommending tracks, etc.
We’ll provide a package of audio tracks to the musicians — along with cover art, a professionally mixed video and professionally shot pictures of the show — but it’ll be up to each band to get their music to online stores such as iTunes and CDBaby or physical retail spots. We’re not interested in managing the machinations of music sales. Our profit margin is much greater designing software.
Once the product has been delivered, we’ll provide a free download of each album, along with links off to corresponding media from the evening back here at HQ. All we ask in return from people downloading the tracks is their email address and an optional PayPal donation to help us recoup our initial costs.
All of this is a designed effort to build community around diverse local artists, with local music fans, while still providing access to people around the world with overlapping tastes of music.
The Radials Live at the dotmatrix project by the dotmatrix project is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Another John Ford special is hot off the presses and ready to be served. Yes, John Ford is a front-end engineer God. No, he does not pay me to say such things. He simply makes cool shit work on the intertubes, super fast and to spec.
I swear I could take on Silicon Valley if I only had 20 John Ford clones.
What we have to the right is a dotmatrix project event calendar. As new gigs are scheduled, we post the event to Upcoming.org, add them to the dotmatrix project group over there and this fansy, shmansy, customized badge dynamically displays updated show dates within our custom design. It’s not revolutionary or anything, but I dig it.
The super cool thing about this particular pimped badge is that now you can use it as a promotional widget on your own blog, Live Journal, web site, etc.
Yes, you — the person who says that he digs live music, but never seems to finds the time to hit a show. I know you — you tell your girlfriends that you’re going to check out this awesome underground band at this totally cool spot, and then you bail to watch a Sex in the City rerun.
Tell me I don’t know who you are.
So now that you blog and participate with every social network known to man, you can wash away your live music dissing sins by simply posting the following code into your sidebar:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.dotmatrixproject.com/badge/"></script>
For those of you whose sidebar is a different size than the default 210 width here at HQ, simply use the following code and customize the width setting to your liking:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.dotmatrixproject.com/badge/?width=210"></script>
Down the road we’re going to support various visual themes and potentially accept styles submitted by you, our loyal readers. We do things like this because we love you. And because without your uncontrolled fanatical support of this here project, it’s not going to go anywhere.
So if you love music and want a pain-free, cost-free, time-free, guilt-free way to support your neighbors trying to gain exposure in an industry that’s tougher than ever to catch a break within, well, you know what to do.
-Sean
(originally uploaded by Rikke Moltisanti)
If you think you can capture the essence of a live show like in the above picture, we need to talk. Same thing goes for filmmakers with the following video:
The Wigg Report: It Won’t Take Long from Sean Coon on Vimeo.
We’re putting on a monthly show in the Back Bar of The Green Burro in downtown Greensboro. The bands are playing for free, a sound engineer is recording the live show for free, photographers are shooting for free and filmmakers are shooting/editing music videos for free.
Cost of admission: FREE
The idea is that if we all collaborate to create art and release it into the wild — online and off — we’ll be opening doors for each other that might never have been opened otherwise. And over time, if people dig the concept, maybe we can turn it into a sponsored event with a sustainable business model to support live, local music in downtown Greensboro.
Along these lines, we’re looking to build a community of photographers and filmmakers interested in participating at least one time. That means you’ll be joining up with a media team and collaborating with the bands before the show on shot ideas. If you want to do more than one show, we’ll do our best to schedule it. If you want to work with a specific filmmaker, photographer or band, we’ll do our best to accommodate that as well.
We’re good like that.
Photographers: We’re looking to meet photographers who have access to DSLR cameras and can really craft a shot. If you have a great eye, you’re in. There’s no pledging involved, no hazing, no sleeping with farm animals. And while that last sentence read like an extremely male perspective on stupid things adolescent men might have to do in order to join something potentially cool — though this ain’t a corny frat — we’d definitely like the talented ladies in our community to participate just as much, if not more. So I promise, no more horrible analogies, ladies.
So if you’re interested in participating, please follow these two steps:
Filmmakers: While we’d like to have professional filmmakers participate on the project, we’re very open to amateur filmmakers and videographers. All we ask is that you know how to use a modern digital video camera, have a good eye and have at least some experience editing on non-linear systems. dotmatrix HQ has a digital editing bay with Final Cut Pro, so you’ll be able to edit with your co-filmmaker on top notch equipment.
If you’d like to join up, please follow these two steps:
Cross-Promotions We’re currently working on finalizing deals with local establishments to cross-promote the material created from the show. I don’t want to jinx the potential deals in the works by naming names, but I will say that we’re close to finalizing we’ve finalized a deal where a major movie theater with Carousel Cinemas on Battleground in Greensboro to present still shots and music videos from our show prior to the trailers run before each film shown in the theater. We’re also working on establishing a quarterly photo exhibit in a well known downtown venue to present the best shots of the previous three shows.
Both of these cross-promotions are in the works to market the name and work of our participating media creators.
So are you down or what!?
When I first met Shawn Patch, the lead guitarist of The Radials — a high-energy, twangy, “Hank Williams Jr. dueling with Johnny Cash in the back lot while Patterson Hood pours Jack Daniels lyrics over their heads” band out of Greensboro, NC — he was one-half of a two piece ensemble with vocalist & rhythm guitarist, Stephen Corbett.
Fast-forward six months to last Friday when The Radials opened up for Sorry About Dresden at the kickoff dotmatrix project event and the dynamic duo had grown to a full five player band. And while I was beyond taken by their full sound and stage presence, it was their lap steel guitarist, Tom Beardslee, who I couldn’t stop watching.
After the show, Tom and I chatted for a bit and he passed me his last album, Good Company. As I do with all artists I discover, I ran Tom down online later that night and low and behold — his story matched the uniqueness of his play:
Tom is not your average pop musician. He has made several trips to West Africa to study highlife, soukous, Afrobeat, and traditional music. He also worked in Ghana as a studio and live guitarist, playing with musicians like Okyerema Asante, Pat Thomas, Jewel Ackah, Sharon Katz, and members of Osibisa. He lived the life of a highlife bandsman with Amakye Dede’s Super High Kings, with whom he toured all of Ghana, as well as in Togo and Cote D’Ivoire.
In the US, Tom has worked with musicians from all over the world since his early teens. He has played styles as diverse as flamenco, punk, reggae, ska, rockabilly, blues, country, bluegrass, funk, and soul. His diverse musical wanderings have led him to work with such artists as Country Joe McDonald, Clarence Bucaro, Sekouba Bambino, Kaikpai Ukpendi, Big Dread, and Alassane Sarr.
Tom has recently earned a Master’s Degree in Ethnomusicology from Ohio State. He studied at OSU with Dr. Daniel Avorgbedor and Dr. Margarita Mazo, and at the University of Ghana with John Collins and J.H.K. Nketia. His studies have led to work with Afropop Worldwide, Guitar Player Magazine, Acoustic Guitar Magazine, and Fingerstyle Guitar.
Not a bad prelude to a listen, so I popped in Good Company, kicked up my feet and closed my eyes for a listen.
I’m not sure I can classify this album. It definitely has deep roots in wide range of blues, but it also has such an interesting contemporary feel without it being stereotypical. Good Company is mature, familiar and arranged, yet Beardslee’s layering has a real, substantive and simultaneously sweet edge to it.
It’s a sound that I haven’t quite heard before.
Beardslee’s storytelling is steeped in rich metaphors and interesting instrumental juxtapositions, yet it’s his lyrical delivery that cuts through the air and exposes his old soul. Whether he’s playful, crooning, narrating or belting, Beardslee brings it with an authentic flavor.
Toss in his picking and well, it’s found a home in my rotation.
Take a listen:
Stacks
I Would
There’s a dirty rumor floating around town that Tom is leaving Greensboro for the Midwest to head back to school. If true, it’ll be a loss for our music community.
