#240517: microtour to Linz

The Backstairs Tone
⎋/~

On Sunday I came home from a mini train tour and have been trying to catch up with everything since then.

Two months ago I got a confirmation that my proposition called #BeYourOwnGlitchPlatformWithOthers lecture-performance got accepted. Based on it I knew then that I will travel with train to Linz I figured that I wanted to try to find some more dates on my way. I setup a little page and fished about it via email to some contacts and on the fedi/masto (sonomu.club). At the end I had three additional dates (+ two in Linz): Brno, Prague, and Dresden. I played a sound performance in Brno, but in Prague and Dresden I did a lecture on this Be Your Own Platform idea(s) and a bit of micro-research.

I had great time! The travel with train is pretty easy - I took a Interrail ticket - not the cheapest but it actually is cheaper if you do a decent number of traveling days and switch trains a lot. It was quite rare that I was sitting next to someone - it was usually an empty seat. You can read and/or work and it mostly goes from center to center of towns.

I was very happy to meet some old friends, making new ones; many connections, many discussions. Some good food, talks and walks, all lovely cities.

The 'lecture' part is mainly composed of thinking and researching possibilities that a musician has in a post-Bandcamp world. This might be a peculiar expression and its context is sale of this great fair-trade music marketplace/platform to Epic Games (huge game-making company) and later to pretty-unknown Songtradr. From the shock came a lot of pondering and search for alternatives, a hashtag #BeYourOwnPlatform and a website https://beYourOwnPlatform.site, and finally a lecture-performance. But it seems like it's only a beginning of more thorough research project exploring digital autonomy and musicianship in age of computer networks. I really hope to turn transcription of the lecture in an article in next week.

I'm excited about this research as it so seems that one of life-long passions are digital networks - I've been part of them, using them, one way or another, since my childhood. And I'm looking forward to theorise as well as aesthetically rework/remix the 'becomings' and 'goings' of subjectivities, networks, sounds and musical forms emerging from thoughts and affects inevitably surfacing from complex web of contemporary ways of life.

Anyway.

Most of lectures and performances on the tour were recorded - only Prague one not, as I forgot to press record button there. I will share most of those recordings with you in the comming weeks. But here I'm extracting a bit from my first stop in Brno, where I played in a studio/space called DINN in care of incredible Tomáš Vtípil.

I micro-blogged a tiny diary on my mastodon account at sonomu.club.