thealivewire.com

Home

In Your Face MySpace!

(click view)

Getting Concerts "Wired"

Alive Wire music Concerts are more than sound. They are an ebb and flow of sound and emotion between the crowd and the musicians.

Because of this Alive Wire involves the audience through high-tech and even low-tech experiments in interactivity. Different concerts involve different types of experimentation with networked jams, sampling, live cameras and some stuff we just don't talk about until it's time to do it.

These experiments lend a "smart mob " or "crowd-sourcing " vibe to the events. Anything that's heard or seen may end up sampled or remixed live.

This draws the crowd ever closer to the stage and video projection screens. By the end of an ideal Alive Wire event the line between audience and artist is wonderfully blurred...if not erased.

So if you come, bring your camera phone, instrument, dv cam, paints and canvas, poetry or whatever else captures your voice and imagination.

Before the event even starts you can come to our site to submit clips or images of your artistic work*. Then on concert nights we'll be able to include your works or even be ready to cue you into an Alive Wire song or visual.

-Jeff

[*this feature is still developing... we do have the email working now. You can send original Creative Commons "Sampling" Licensed sound, video, images or text under 200 Mb to: contribute content ]

the sound workshop in my dungeon

Atmosphere has so much to do with creativity... I saw a beautiful painting the other day by an artist I know personally. When I mentioned that I liked it, my friend told me that she was inspired to paint that particular painting while I was playing music with some friends here in Switzerland. I felt honored and got to thinking about how one artistic medium can influence another.

Anyway, I have been working on my creative "atmosphere" in the place where I play music most of the time. I live in a small apartment inside a big old mansion that's been classified as a historical monument (not just for its beauty, but also because it is home to the first indoor toilet in the French speaking part of Switzerland :)
There are lots of things I love about this place, but the thing I'll miss the most when I move home to the US in January isn't the beautiful "Grande Salon" or the fields of wheat with a view of Lake Geneva and the French alps around Evian... Its the dungeon. The French have an interesting phrase for saying the dungeon - Les Oubliettes or "the forgotten". I guess in the old castles that's where they threw people they wanted to be forgotten.

So I've cleared out a space down here and set up my amps, microphones, effects and a pair of borrowed studio monitors to make a project studio that I call "Les Oubliettes - Atelier du Son". Literally, "Sound Workshop of the Forgotten." I should have some sound samples to share of my first "Les Obliettes" songs in a few days.

The Meaning Behind The Music

By: HDS (creative commons attribution) Musicians helping the needy are currently being hyped as much as actors in politics...or politicians in Hollywood.

Though I've never been rich or famous, it's been normal for my brother and I to volunteer and contribute to charitable causes since our teens.

I was fifteen years old when I first traveled to Peru.

"Why did I wear sandals?" I wondered as I stepped through the muddy garbage of a slum in Iquitos, Peru.

I cringed as my foot slipped from the sandal into the sludge. The brackish sewer water pooled into canals as it drained from the city directly into Belem, a slum of Iquitos.

While I shook my foot to rid it of the filth, a group of children were splashing and playing in a ditch nearby.