mitch's blog

Recently I've been listening to and researching Giorgio Moroder. Listening to the song embedded below, from 1977, it's easy to identify elements of modern electronic dance music. Moroder has to be considered as one of the pioneers of music we classify as house or electro.

I've often wondered about the Maritime (or Atlantic Canada) music scene of the 1970s and 80s. Were there groups or performers from the Maritimes using drum machines and synths to create disco/dance/new wave sounding music? Unfortunately, I have never found any information online. Any help?

(on a related note, this lack of digital information reinforces the need to get more people online. We're going to lose a lot of historical knowledge if it's not digitally available.)

The Prince Edward Island legislature and press have recently been dealing with the issue of inclusion of bloggers in the legislature's gallery. Tim Banks has an update discussing Steven Pate's removal from the accredited media. John Morris has some pragmatic thoughts on the issue as well.

While I don't want to analyze the validity of Mr. Pate's personal arguments to be included in the gallery, the issue does bring to light some of the out-dated notions still held onto by some in the PEI journalistic community. In 2007 I blogged about The Guardian's archaic Terms of Use on submitted content. A few months ago I commented on a Guardian web posting that copied text from Wikipedia without attribution (note how the personal attacks in the comments were published, contrary to The Guardian's commenting policy). With these two examples, I hope to show that the culture of journalistic integrity is lacking within The Guardian's staff.

We then get comments like, "In my opinion, there is no place for partisan individuals, lobbyists or those with vested interests to be part of what is supposed to be an independent press gallery,” said Thibodeau" (The Guardian, Oct 20/09). The idea of non-partisan and independent journalists is a logical fallacy that should be understood by a professional journalist in this day. It makes me wonder to what degree journalists are engaged in training and education related to journalistic ethics and current issues after they end up in their careers.

Judging from comments on various blogs and news sources on the recent event involving Mr. Pate, it appears the wider issue of the evolution of journalistic objectivity and authority is being considered implicitly, though in an incomplete and uninformed manner. So my civic duty requires me to post an essay I wrote on the topic while I was a grad student at Ryerson. The essay is primarily focused on the idea of objectivity and authority within the sub-cultures of "professional journalists" and bloggers. It takes awhile to get to the meat of the current situation we find ourselves in but it's in there. Don't let the required theoretical preamble scare you, it may pique your interest, however dense it may read.

Authority and Objectivity: The Politics and Ideologies of Bloggers and Journalists (PDF)

Since moving to Hamilton, I've been quietly putting the pieces together on Social Construction Web Solutions Inc. Don't let the long name scare you, it's just an incorporated body to support various projects that share a common theme: technology and people (the process of registering a business name and finding a relevant domain name verges on being ridiculous).

So what projects are coming? Look for us to be offering some interesting social media and open source software training offerings in your neck of the woods. Also, I'm looking at starting an open source project related to Recommendrix and have a couple of web community sites that have been on the backburner for years that need to see the light of day.

I'll be blogging over at the socialconstruction.ca blog quite often so head over and put us in your feed readers.

I've uploaded the last mix from Gaston Lafleur, I believe it was put together in December 2007 while in Toronto and departs from Gaston's usual sound. Downtempo and ambient, this mix is good for working or relaxing.
Download: Gaston Lafleur - Walden Pond (~66min, ~80Mb)
Tracklist:

• Burial - Gutted
• Cassius - Nothing
• Telepopmusik - Love Can Damage Your Health
• Layo & Bushwacka - Isn't This a Lovely Day
• Nightmares on Wax - You Wish
• Hugh Masekela - Night in Tunisia
• Metro Area - Miura
• M83 & Benoit Villeneuve - Run Into Flowers (Midnight Fuck Remix by Jackson)
• Cassius - Protection
• Layo & Bushwacka - Love Story
• Trentemøller Feat. Ane Trolle - Moan
• Chris Isaak - Wicked Game (Trentemøller Businessman Dubby Games Remix)
• Boards of Canada - In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country

I think I'll take over for Gaston from here-on-out. Gaston and his contemporary, Null Hypothesis, were jestful fellows. They engaged in the alter-ego, third-person, over-the-top, self-hyping activities that so many other electronic musicians perform. But is Gaston too well-known to depart? :)

Recent rumblings about campus radio at UPEI have motivated me to post some content and opinion about Radio@UPEI and any future endeavor UPEI students may undertake.

My involvement with Radio@UPEI ended in the summer of 2007 after working on the upgrade of the weblogs@UPEI, Radio@UPEI, etc., drupal backend. Before my last semester at McGill, in the summer of 2004, UPEISU President Clare Henderson and I chatted on a number of occasions about the need for a web-based media organization run by students at UPEI. I'm not sure if it was Clare that got the ball rolling on the student side of things, but in the Fall Semester the stars aligned and Justin Doiron started pushing hard for a web-radio service at UPEI while Prof. Mark Hemphill was making noise promoting his BEAT programme and the associated weblogs@UPEI community. Around November 2004, UPEI Web Radio was born as a project of BEAT.

I joined BEAT in the winter of 2005 while I took economics and psychology courses at UPEI. We had an abundance of fun working on a number of sub-projects over the next few years: broadcasting live community events, producing content for the ECMA events in 2006 and 2007, working with MusicPEI, MusicNB, and creating Panther Radio. Ryan Palmer has a good historical overview here.

I can't recall any serious discussion regarding terrestrial radio at UPEI. We all realized that the community we were seeking to engage would probably be more inclined to connect online. Plus the fundraising effort associated with radio would have crushed the momentum we were riding in the area of content creation and independent personal publishing.

I'm not sure if anything significant happened with Radio@UPEI after the summer 2007 upgrade. In the spring of 2008, in consultation with Mark Hemphill and Ryan Palmer (founding member of Radio@UPEI and President of the UPEI Independent Student Media society), we started redirecting the sites to the UPEI homepage. The web server which hosted the sites is still online, just not serving the files. So why take the content down?

The core group associated with Radio@UPEI saw the community grow from nothing to something quite unique and personal very quickly. The term "organic" was often thrown around in our discussions. The success of Radio@UPEI was a result of the practiced notion that anyone could contribute on basically their own terms (we had a few very liberal policies in place around appropriate content). When that growth and vibrancy started to diminish, it seemed like the content had died with the community. The content was never envisioned to be presented in "archival" form, it was supposed to be interactive. (Also, there were very practical reasons for taking the sites offline. No one had the time to maintain the infrastructure, which served terabytes worth of data over the two peak years of Radio@UPEI activity.) Why did the community die?

There are several factors I can formulate as being partly responsible in the demise of Radio@UPEI, but there's one that is quite important when considering future attempts of a similar nature at UPEI: a culture of apathy. The current survey circulating online regarding support for a UPEI Radio station has shown a good bit of positive response from what I can gather, but when it's Saturday night in January and a public event deserves to be covered, good-luck rounding up more than a few good souls. And if a future effort doesn't extend beyond the comfortable realm of pre-programmed music and syndicated content, don't bother with it. It will be as relevant to the community as all of the other low-quality traditional media outlets in Charlottetown.

That's all for this post, I'll follow up shortly with an attempt to round-up some of the great Radio@UPEI media still online and provide further dissection of the decline of Radio@UPEI and what a future initiative should look like.

Ten years ago, I was keeping our dial-up modem online all night to download the latest house music, often hearing the songs first on MuchMusic's Electric Circus (remember when MuchMusic was once relevant to music?). Looking back at the 1999 Billboard dance hits chart, it seems that some of my favorite house music songs (definitely not the videos) of all time hit the charts in the summer of 1999.

Bristol's Portishead were trip hop gods in the nineties. In December 2007, they will be curating the All Tomorrow's Parties festival in Minehead, England.

Detroit's Moodymann gives a visually intriguing performance of Freaky MF.

Catchy, chic, and a tad funky, the video for Herbert's Moving Like a Train has some great dancing with an interesting backdrop.