the dotmatrix project

Photo by Tanya Peterson

Josh Neas and I had a blast rapping about DMP, talking ConvergeSouth and listening to some of the live tracks by veterans of the project on his Wednesday night, 6pm to 8pm show on 90.9FM WQFS.

Check it out:

Big ups to Julian Himes and the editorial staff over at Amie Street. They’re digging the concept of our local project out here — building community through live performances of original music and creating media to document the evening — so they’re keeping their eyes and ears on what we release into the wild.

Their first DMP pimpage — Sorry About Dresden’s Shake Your Fist music video — has landed in their weekly Amie Street TV feature.

Bam!

As of this very moment, you can download Sorry About Dresden Live at the dotmatrix project for free from Amie Street.

The longer you wait to download, the higher the price will go. All proceeds go to the artists. Fun, eh?

You can also download it for free from Last.fm.

Enjoy!

Sorry About Dresden: Shake Your Fist from Sean Coon on Vimeo.

Rock.

Props to Ioannis Batsios for editing this video from footage he shot with Jason Pierce and Takele Woldu. And please try to tell me that James Hepler, on drums, isn’t a friggin’ machine!

Saddle Creek Records is the label for Sorry About Dresden, one of the bands the dotmatrix project put on this past April. Before watching this film, I knew Matt Oberst was from Omaha, but I had no idea how tight-knit and communal the Saddle Creek effort has been since 1993. A bunch of kids loving, playing, recording and distributing music evolved into the label and a group of lifelong friends that we outsiders couldn’t possibly appreciate without the back story.

Well, I’m appreciating the fuck out of them now.

We’re doing so many things differently here at DMP, yet covering so much of the same “building community” ground.

These guys ran super hard with analog recording, distribution and marketing — because it was all they had available to them at the time — to pimp each other and their community.

We’re pimping local and regional bands — some we know well, many we don’t — using state of the art live, digital recording techniques and editing software that wasn’t available to the consumer market in the 90’s. Our distribution and marketing goals are hyper local, but they’re also available for global discovery simply because of our use of the internet.

I’d bet the Lumberjack guys would’ve lost their shit back in the day playing in the sandbox we now take for granted.

It’s just so very cool to experience the story behind a living, breathing idea 15 years deep into its evolution. Thank you, Jason Kulbel and Rob Walters, for bringing Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek to life.

UPDATE: You can buy the full DVD documentary here.

James “Animal” Hepler pinged me the other day and asked if I was interested in checking out Mitch Easter recording some new Sorry About Dresden instrumentals over at the Fidelitorium in Kernersville.

Uhm, that would be a “yes.”

So, Molly and I headed over late Saturday afternoon and caught the tail end of their recordings for the day. I snagged a snippet on my camera, though the video sound does zero justice to the playback sound in the studio.

It’s an amazing quality setup, all the way down to the concrete walls with mathematically designed vertical slats to trap sound.

And while $800 a day might sound like a lot to pay for a studio recording these days, Mitch’s studio is like a toy store for musicians. He’s got one room wall to wall stacked with guitars of all shapes and sizes, ranging from antique 12 strings to what looked like some type of Asian stringed instrument — all available for use.

Aside from touring the various nooks of the studio with James, we spent our time hanging out on the couch in the back of the engineering room, surfing the web and shooting the shit.

A very chill experience with a bunch of talented musicians and solid guys. I knew that doors would open once we kicked off the dotmatrix project, but I had no idea of the shapes and sizes to come.

Saturday was a classic one.

More pictures at flickr.

Dan and I just finished remixing the live albums for both Sorry About Dresden and The Radials. Both bands gave us similar feedback on our original mix — vocals dominated while the instruments faded at times — so we took a few hours tonight to make the changes. It was worth it, as they both sound much fuller now.

We’re using the Mackie Tracktion 3 music production software that came with the Onyx 1620 board w/ Firewire output. It’s basically left us marveling over the fact that unlike the old days — when bands had to navigate their live play around one centrally located ribbon mic to land a decent recording — we have the luxury with out-of-the-box software to record multiple channels directly to a rather standard MacBook Pro and get amazing results.

I love me some technology.

Here’s the channel breakdown for how we setup the first show:

• Red: Backup vocal mic one
• Orange: Backup vocal mic two
• Yellow: Lead vocal mic
• Green: Guitar mic (The Radials only)
• Aqua: Reverb channel
• Sky blue: Band mic, left
• Dark blue: Band mic, right
• Purple: Audience mic

Based on the bands feedback, we’re going to move in the left and right side band mics closer to the amps for this Thursday night’s show. They were directly behind the FOH monitors and didn’t get quite enough oomph with their default output. We might even play with running extra lines directly out of the amps to capture the sound clean.

We’re recognizing patterns on a bunch of levels these days at HQ, and not only within the production environment.

A Different Kind Of “Label”

If we keep up this show & recording pace, we’ll probably put out somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 live albums per year — all acts local to Greensboro and the surrounding region — with quality standards moving towards being just a few degrees below a studio recording. All at no cost to the artists.

So what’s in it for us? Straight up and down, the answer is quite simply, “the attention.”

No, I’m not referring to attention as in the, “Check us out, we’re fucking cool,” kind of attention. We’re not shooting for gold stars, free drinks or ego boosts — we’re talking about harnessing the attention economy of the internet age.

This is an information age business in the planning.

While we’re building community in the real world with live, original music productions in downtown Greensboro, we’re simultaneously creating synapses in the intertubes with media reproductions of each evening — live recordings, photographs and music videos.

Once the media has been generated, edited and uploaded, we’re applying a pretty intense metadata schema to each media object for enhancing findability and to grow online community around all of the participants — the musicians, filmmakers, photographers, sound engineer and, yes, our brand.

At the core of this entire approach is the notion that this is all free for people to engage with — from going to a free show to ripping track recordings for iPod plays to participating in the tagging of online media which helps promote your favorite artists or songs.

More important to the core position of the dotmatrix brand — built around the idea that many individuals coming together will convey a unique experience in the aggregate — is that whether the participants of the dotmatrix project are musicians, filmmakers, photographers, audience members or online fans, each participant can be promoted to one degree or another due to the structured nature of web object data and metadata aggregation.

Bands building community around media of their performances; people building community around similar tastes in music, videos, photos and shows. And hopefully, a business that can present compelling interface representations of these relationships — both in the real and online.

Down the line, this 2.0 focus on already valuable semantic concepts like free, open, read/write and aggregation will most likely vest with future implementations including notions such as Data Portability.

All we have to do in the short-term is make sure we don’t hard code our business plan into a corner where it can’t be tapped by the never-ending “things to come.”

Oh, yeah. And to make sure we don’t get crappy instrumental channel recordings.

[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 Tracktion 3 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.

Prego, baby. Prego.

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.

(originally uploaded by Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan)

(originally uploaded by Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan)

(originally uploaded by Mikey aka DaSkinnyBlackMan)

Many more to come.

Poster by Justin Reich.