BlogWorld Expo New York 2011 brings Podcasting Pavilion to NYC in May
May 6, 2011 by Bill Palmer · 1 Comment
by Bill Palmer
BlogWorld isn’t just heading east, it’s bringing podcasting with it. The formerly Las Vegas-based event is migrating to both coasts in 2011, and while west coasters will have to wait until the fall for the Los Angeles event, New Yorkers are getting their BlogWorld fill later this month from May 24th to the 26th at the Javits Center. The podcasting pavilion will be located on the tradeshow floor and will feature “ten discussion groups focused solely on the issues of podcasting” according to event organizers. What’s more, the podcasting efforts are being led by podcast community veteran Lynette Young, who gets our nod of approval. Young explains the origins of BlogWorld’s podcasting pavilion here. More details on BlogWorld 2011 including registration options can be found here.
Podcaster spotlight: comedy4cast
March 10, 2010 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
How did you come up with the idea for comedy4cast?
When I first learned about podcasting, early in 2005, I knew I wanted to be a part of it. But I didn’t want to get in over my head. I mean, I was listening to some shows that would go on for two or three hours. That seemed daunting daunting to me. So I thought about things that were fun for me to do. During college I worked at the campus radio station and I loved writing funny commercials. After college, I wrote a number of short plays. So, the idea of producing a short comedy podcast sounded appealing. And, to make absolutely sure it stayed short, I put that right in the show the show title “comedy4cast: a podcast in four minutes or less.” Over the years the show has gone through some format changes and broken through the four-minute boundary. But fortunately, it’s still nowhere near the three hour mark.
Did you always envision the show as a podcast, or what led you to that format?
Yes, I always envisioned the show as an audio program. If I went to video I’d have to restrict my ideas to things that could be easily filmed — on a budget of zero dollars and a crew of one. I prefer the endless possibilities of audio for comedy4cast.
What can listeners expect from a typical episode?
With my current format, the show has a sitcom feel. I’ve set up the premise that I run comedy4cast out of the Venus Arms Hotel & Towers in the mythical town of Middling Fair. I brought a lot of the recurring characters from the old format into the new setup. For instance, the listener might hear Danny Hillcrest, a movie reviewer who never actually sits through a movie. Currently there is also a underlying story arc, which will wrap up soon. After the regular episode is over, there will often be a short segment about the virtual table of random things. Essentially the table is a way for fans of the show to interact with each other. Anyone can call in and pretend to drop off or pick up all sorts of random things.
Your bio lists you as a “Disney park fan” but you live in New England, a long way away from any of the Disney parks. How did that come about?
I first visited Disneyland in 1984 and instantly fell in love with the place. Since then I’ve been been to Disney World, Disneyland Paris and even Tokyo Disneyland. But Anaheim still holds a special place in my heart and I get back there whenever I can. I’ve also been lucky enough to combine my loves of Disney and podcasting from time to time. I’ve provided audio for fan-run Disney podcasts, had Disney podcasters on my show and have run live events for fans at both Disneyland and Disney World.
comedy4cast has recently donated some items to a charity auction for The Boom Effect. What’s going on there?
Friend and fellow podcaster Tee Morris lost his wife earlier this year, suddenly leaving him to raise their young daughter, nicknamed, Sonic Boom, all by himself. When Philippa Ballentine organized a fund-raising event to help set up a trust fund for Sonic Boom, I wanted to do whatever I could to help. And I’m happy to say that close to $30,000 has been raised so far. This isn’t the first time there has been a loss in the podcasting community. For instance, we lost AJ (“Road Rage”) in 2006 and Joe Murphy in 2007, to name but two. These losses leave giant holes in our community, but it’s good when we can do something to help.
You’ve been podcasting since the early days. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen, and where do you think it goes from here?
I think podcasting has become a lot more corporate. Perhaps it is a natural progression, but I feel that something is being lost. I mentioned the podcasting community earlier. That is what I remember most from the “early days.” It seemed like everyone knew everyone else. When the first Podcast Expo was held in Ontario California in 2005, it was like a class reunion of people who had never met. Everyone there was a rock star. And, while I still believe that is true, it’s harder to convince the general public that they might enjoy a homemade podcast just as much as repurposed content from NPR or ABC. People are creatures of habit and it’s easier to go with what you know than try something new. That was the advantage podcasting’s pioneers had — there was virtually no corporate competition. People would go to Web sites like Podcast Alley and Podcast Pickle to discover and interact with podcasters who were just ordinary folks. Try doing that with Ricky Gervais.
At the top of one of your recent episodes you thanked some of your fans by name. How vital is your relationship with your fans?
It is every podcasters hope to hear from their listeners or viewers. A podcaster may love what they are doing, but knowing that people are having a strong enough reaction to the content to write or phone in — that makes your day. And, the same is true in reverse. When someone is nice enough to leave you a five-star rating at iTunes, I think that deserves a shout out. I always hope that my listeners are having a good time. And when I get their feedback, I try to take it into consideration. Yes, it’s my show, and I’m not getting paid to do it, but sometimes listeners can be good editors. Their comments are a way of making you think about what you’re doing. Their feedback can be like a giant highlighter applied to part of your script, with a note that says “consider reworking this section.” When several people expressed their disappointment over my decision to discontinue the virtual table of random things, I eventually figured out a way to re-incorporate it into the show. So, my advice to anyone who listens to podcasts — especially the independently-produced ones — is be sure to drop them an email and let them know how much you like the show.
Learn more at comedy4cast.com • iTunes • Facebook • Twitter
Adrina Thorpe interview
the iProng interview with independent singer-songwriter Adrina Thorpe who discusses her new album Halflight & Shadows, where she gets her songwriting inspiration, and how podsafe music has impacted her career…
interview by Bill Palmer
Adrina Thorpe and I are on the phone to talk about her new album of beautifully haunting piano-accompanied melodies, Halflight & Shadows, but before we discuss the new music I can’t help but ask her about something she first got involved with several years ago: making her music legally available to be played on podcasts…
You were one of the first artists to make their music podsafe back in 2005. I’m curious about how you first heard about it.
C.C. Chapman sent me an email on MySpace and told me about it when it was just starting out, and so I put all my stuff up there. And I think because I was one of the first people up there, I was podcasted so much that I was one of the top three.
I see you’re still at it, you put a song from the new record into the podsafe network. Do you think it’s had a substantial impact on your career over the past four years?
Hugely, yeah. I totally saw a correlation. I think that was a big part of why I did well with online sales, because I stopped going out and performing and I just let the internet kind of do its thing, and I was pretty happy with the results. I still like performing but there was a time when I took a break when I was recording, and everything just kept hopping along.
Your first record Elusive came out almost five years ago. There’s always a tendency on the part of fans to say “what took so long?”
I didn’t start thinking about recording it til like three years ago. At first I was going to do an EP, and then we kind of changed our minds afterwards. My producer was like “hey, let’s do a full album.” So we decided to do a full album, but my producer is in Italy and I’m here, so that’s one factor. He lives in Tuscany. Another factor is I’m very involved in my family’s life, and that takes a lot of time. And then another factor is I really wanted everything to be just right, and I was doing it in little spare snippets here and there and I was getting a lot more involved, so that took some more time. Being a perfectionist, that took some more time.
The last album I did, it was done in a month. We did it in a studio. I just came every day and we just recorded with just me and my two producers. But with this album we used tons of different musicians, we went to lots of different studios, we rented equipment lots of different times, went to a lot of different places, and it was sort of piecemeal, a bit at a time. Also I did the two trance songs [with DJ Shah] and that kind of diverted my attention for awhile.
Is it different going to make this new record now? Not only were you able to establish your own internal fanbase with the first record, but then also the external exposure with the trance songs. Is it tempting to think “I’ve got to make what people expect of me” or are you able to block that stuff out?
I blocked it out completely with this record. The last record I really, really cared about what people thought. But with this record I really did it completely for myself. The songs are not radio friendly in length. The majority of them are four to five minutes long. They’re just me with a broken heart, pouring it out, and just learning to fight for the beauty in life. The last album I was coming fresh out of songwriting classes and thinking about what people liked to hear, analyzing what kind of songs make it on the radio, happy songs, songs with successful people. These kind of things make it on the radio, you know? Analyzing song length, song structure.
I broke a lot of rules on this album, and I don’t know if that’s going to adversely affect sales. We’ll see. Little scared here. But I really did it just because I wanted to do it how I wanted to do it. That’s another reason why it took a little longer.
Speaking of breaking rules, the songs on Halflight & Shadows are arranged from darkness to light, from beginning to end.
That’s probably not very good for sales, but it was the way it had to go because the whole point of the album is that I really wanted to take people along a journey with me, from the darkest place in their life to sort of finding the light. I spent a long time ordering the songs progressively from dark to light.
With the kind of gentle, lovely, earnest songs you make, the stereotype would be that you could only create that when you’re sitting in the dark corner of an empty room, just you and your piano late a night, no one around.
I need silence, I need quiet, I need to be alone. But a lot of the songs come to me when I’m driving in my car. But it’s still solitude. You’ve got things moving past you and you’re sort of zoning but you’re focusing. They come to me when I’m doing some kind of mundane task, and then sort of feeling and having a chance to be slightly introspective on my own, and it’ll just pop out. It’ll just hit me and I’ll start singing it.
So that’s how I did a lot of them. And the other ones I’ll get an idea by playing chords around them. But usually it’s melody first, with the lyrics, then I add a few more lyrics in and play on the piano. Occasionally I’ve done it lyrics first, but mostly it’s in the car.
Can you see yourself writing songs for other artists?
That sounds like fun actually, once I have more time on my hands when things sort of settle down. I’ve had a couple requests to write for some people up in Canada, emerging Canadian artists. Yeah, that sounds like something I might enjoy doing later on.
Adrina Thorpe is performing at Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles on August 10th. Halflight & Shadows is available for download at HalflightAndShadows.com now. Learn more at AdrinaThorpe.com
iProng Magazine #43: Paul van Dyk, Phil Rossi, Burn Halo, War Tapes and more
July 14, 2009 by Beatweek · 9 Comments
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iProng Magazine #43: Paul van Dyk interview and more
July 14, 2009 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
iProng Magazine has released its 43rd issue featuring a cover story interview with Paul van Dyk, podiobook author Phil Rossi talks Crescent, and reviews of Documents To Go and Bed Bugs. Also interviewed: Burn Halo, War Tapes, Daniel Brusilovsky, Jamie Lynn Noon and much more.
The Crystal Method interview
June 11, 2009 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
There are a number of reasons why The Crystal Method is perhaps the most recognizable name in electronic music over the past decade and a half. While the duo’s studio albums have built a large following within the electronic genre, their cross-genre collaborations over the years have expanded their presence even further, along with their work on everything from movie soundtracks to the original Nike+iPod soundtrack. Having just released their new studio album Divided By Night, I caught up with Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland to talk about Divided By Night and more.
Last I heard you guys were building your own studio so you could make this album, and that was a few years ago. So what took you so long?
Ken: Well two years is actually not bad time for us, you know? (laughs). Up until we got into the new studio we were busy with a lot of other things. We did a soundtrack album, a mix CD, we did a project for Apple and Nike called Drive, and so that kept us pretty busy. And then when we got into the studio we started working for real on the new album.
Divided By Night is a phrase that could apply to a lot of things that have gone on in this decade as far as division and darkness. Is that a worldview statement, or is there something else to the name?
Scott: It was more borne out of this beautiful sunset that we saw flying from one DJ gig to another. We were coming over the city of El Paso at night with the lights on, and above you could see the stars and space and the moon and sort of off on the horizon was this sort of bend of beautiful color and lights that obviously was the sun setting on the west coast. And being from the west, the beauty of it all was something to behold. And then “Divided By Night” just popped into my head. It was more a reflection of there’s my family, my kids, my wife, reflecting on them, you know, probably sitting at the table and eating and sort of wrapping up the day, and here we are at night flying into another city to spend the next four or five hours living this alter ego, these characters of this band that comes in and takes over a club and plays music two or three, and the two different worlds sort of seem to be divided by out late-night personas, if you will. Album titles are difficult. You try not to have, at lease we try not to put too much meaning into them, and kind of feel that that should be left to the consumers or the fans to add their own meaning to that. It does conjure up a bunch of ideas, and I think that’s cool that we can come up with a name that does have little bit of mystery and intrigue behind it.
You guys are no strangers to collaborations over the years, but this album has a ton of guest stars even by your standards. Was that the plan going in, let’s get a bunch of people to work with, or did it just end up happening that way?
Ken: I think it was overall a little bit more of a plan. We wanted to have more song-oriented tracks and a little more vocals. It’s not overwhelmingly more but it is more than we usually have on our albums. A lot of times we’ll try a lot of collaborations and they won’t work out, but only a couple we tried this time didn’t work out, and no one will hear those. But these are the ones that came out really great.
You told me last year that you were really looking forward to working with Peter Hook. You ended up getting him on two tracks on the album. What was the experience like of bringing him into the studio and recording with him?
Ken: It was really great. Some of the collaborations on the album, it was people that had their own studios or people that were not available to Los Angeles, but Peter Hook was in LA for a couple of days. I think it was when he was doing some promotion for the documentary side of the whole Control / Joy Division, you know, the two films that came out. So he was in town and we got him to come by, and he was just a really amazing guy. He was really funny and played well. He’s not afraid to play his signature sound.
The Matisyahu song turned out great. But it’s almost wall to wall vocals and he’s got such a unique identifiable sound. Did you have any thoughts about that when you chose that as the first single, that people are going to think it’s just a Matisyahu single, they’re not going to realize it’s The Crystal Method?
Ken: We still feel like it really feels like a hard-driving Crystal Method track with a lot of electronic elements in it, but yeah, you know, we did pare down the vocals some. But it was going to be our first single, and singles for the most part have vocals. We were pretty comfortable with it.
Scott: Yeah, I had never heard him do a vocal like that. The vocal and the treatment of the vocal and the lyrical direction fit the track really well. Anytime bands that don’t have a lead singer and you use someone that has developed their own sound, you run the risk of that. It was just about putting out a song that we thought sounded good.
You guys have done so many things, soundtracks, collaborations, remixes. What have you not done yet that you still want to do at some point as a Crystal Method project?
Ken: Playing the Super Bowl wouldn’t be bad.
Scott: So many things have happened to us that we’ve been a part of that early on we would have had no idea these thing would have been a possibility. And the reason why that has happened for us is that we’re always in the moment, we’re always sort of focused on where we are at the time.
Read iProng Magazine’s 41st issue featuring The Crystal Method, iPhone 3G S and more
Photos from New Media Expo
August 22, 2008 by Beatweek · Leave a Comment
Photos from the 2008 New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Thank you to everyone who stopped by the iProng booth, we hope you enjoyed our non-stop live podcasting…
