Backstage, after the gig
If you missed it, I’ve spent the last 10 days in Manchester as part of Nitin Sawhney’s Aftershock Project.
Aftershock has been going for about 10 years now, and I’ve been involved in the last three events, which were supported by the European Cultural Foundation. The first was in Genoa, Italy in June last year. The second was in Marseille, France in September – and this one brought together some of the musicians from the first two for a final event in Manchester.
My own involvement in the project is a little bit weird and complicated, so I thought I should explain that a little.
There’s a website…
My friend Stef is (among other things) a website developer, and a very good one at that. He takes on projects that he thinks will be interesting, and he was approached by Debra and Jeremy, the producers of Aftershock.
They explained that Aftershock was a musical collaboration among musicians who have never met, in different cities around the world – and they wanted a website. He thought there were some interesting possibilties in there, and he called me in as someone who thinks a lot about music and the internet.
I met with Debra and Jeremy, and we talked about what was important about the project, and how we could communicate that.
It occurred to me that simply building a website to promote a concert of music that nobody had ever heard was probably a bit of a missed opportunity, and so was simply putting together a deeply worthy, cultural policy-speak online brochure about Aftershock and Nitin Sawhney.
I thought rather than make a website about Aftershock, we should put Aftershock itself online.
It’s all about storytelling
I thought that the interesting bit was not the musicians performing a rehearsed set to an audience, but the process of them coming together, meeting for the first time, trying to write music together, getting to know each other, hanging out, and developing as people.
Or, more accurately, as characters.
But I didn’t want to stage a sort of voyeuristic Big Brother style thing where their every move was recorded by outsiders hanging over them at every stage.
Writing and performing music – especially in its earliest stages – is quite a brave thing to do – let alone with people you don’t know – and it’s hard enough without people who don’t have the same sort of investment and vulnerability pushing cameras in your face.
So I came up with the idea of giving all of the musicians cheap, handheld digital video cameras, and just asking them to point them at whatever they thought was interesting, whenever they thought it was appropriate. But not just while they were making music. At any time throughout the whole process. Back at the hotel, out for dinner with their new friends, in the breaks, during the concert – whenever.
My role was to supplement their footage with a bit of my own (as a sort of ‘inside’ outsider), but mostly to collect what they had recorded and get it up online in a helpful and sensible manner.
Making sense of all that content
Of course, when you have 15 cameras in operation (Nitin Sawhney, the producers and the sound guy all had one too), there’s a lot of material to work with, and not all of it’s going to be great. More importantly, most of it’s only snippets – generally between 30 seconds and 2 minutes at a time.
The approach each musician took was interesting. I thought everyone would just point the camera at other people making music. That’s what I’d do. However, some people made little documentaries, narrating what was going on in front of them. Some turned the camera on themselves and made video diaries. Others took creative and occasionally bizarrely abstract footage. A few people just refused to take part. They were there to play music. Nothing more.
For all of the video I received that was at least intelligible (and not simply the result of a button pressed inadvertently while in someone’s pocket), I added a title, and used tags to help people navigate their way through the content on the site.
On average, there are around 500 pieces of video from each of the Aftershocks I’ve been involved with. And so there needs to be some useful way of making sense of that.
Tagging and metadata
Roberto’s party trick
Every video is tagged with the names of the people who appear in the clip. So if you’re interested in Roberto, for instance, you can click on his name and see all of the videos and photos he appears in. If more than half a dozen of the musicians appear, then the tag is simply ‘The Musicians‘.
I’ve also tagged each video with the name of the song (where it’s been possible to figure that out). So that way, you can watch all of the videos of the song ‘Toast Town‘, for instance – and see how that evolved from an experiment to a real highlight of the show.
You may only be interested in a particular stage of the creative process, so I’ve tagged performance, rehearsal and composition separately. I’ve also tagged different contexts: onstage, offstage, backstage, the musician’s apartment or hotel – and so on. And, of course, some people will mostly be interested in Nitin Sawhney, who has a lot of fans all over the world.
Sometimes (though not often), I’d do a bit of editing
Finally, there are instances where I’ve thought it would be helpful to tag content as being from Amandine’s View (for instance) or where there are photos by Roberto (he takes great shots, and let me have them for the site).
The point is that you can just click on whatever interests you next. In that way, you can make your own story out of the Aftershock Project, and only look at the bits and pieces that interest you, in whichever order you like. Real digital narrative stuff.
It’s all done in the name of research
My interest here is in the way in which live music (and similar) events can be mediated online, and this is a really interesting case study in that. I’ve got lots of information, case studies and experiences to refer to as a result of my involvement in Aftershock, and I’ve been able to translate that into academic conference papers and forthcoming journal articles.
Most importantly, it’s really given me an amazing insight into the day to day activities, thoughts and concerns of professional musicians and music industry people – and there are some great stories to tell.
The technology
We’ve used two types of handheld video cameras. Flips, which are brilliant – and just the right price for this kind of knockabout, casual use (I call them ‘vernacular videos’ – as opposed to professional broadcast content); and Disgo cameras
We started out using Wordpress, but switched to Posterous for each subsite, which means that we can simply post to the blog by email. Nice and simple.
It also means that everything we put up can be automatically propagated out to other sites where people can find the content: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blip.tv.
I used Automator on the Mac to simplify the routine of converting the videos to the right format and size, attaching them to an email addressed to the right place, and with the right syntax on the tagging bit of the email subject line. Wish I’d thought of that in Genoa and Marseille… but the thing that really made it all work was the lightning-fast upload speed at the venue in Manchester. Internet speeds were cripplingly slow and unreliable in both Genoa and Marseille.
I had a bit of help too, this time around (Stef and I worked together in Genoa and it was just me in Marseille). Luke and Remi are a couple of young volunteers from a local college that came in, did a bit of filming, helped with the tagging and uploading. Luke was there all week and was a bit of a star. Remi came towards the end but got stuck right in. Real lifesavers.
Music, culture and people
The best thing about Aftershock (and it’s the best thing about most of the music projects I get involved with), is that I’ve made some great friends, heard some brilliant music, and had a great time with some cool, clever and very talented people.
As you’d expect with a project about collaboration, people are going to team up in different combinations on different projects from here on out, and I’m no exception to this. I’m looking forward to working with sound engineer/producer (and my Manchester housemate) David on the web stuff for his band The Safires; I’ll be doing something with trumpet player Matt (the most camera-shy of all the Aftershock musicians) and I’m already in conversations with Dave, ‘the money guy’ who put together the European funding application.
Perhaps most interestingly of all, I’m going to be exploring a few project ideas with Nitin Sawhney. We have a few overlapping areas of interest, and he’s a fascinating guy. Incredible musician, of course – but also a really interesting thinker. We had some chats about approaches to media in general, as well as about his other main interests: mathematics and quantum physics (about which he is very well-read and informed; I learnt a lot).
So – it’ll be interesting to see if that goes anywhere…
But that’s Aftershock. We’re all done bar the uploading of a few more videos. Audience members (and the musicians) can upload their own pictures and video here at the website and we’ll put them up alongside all the other content.
There are no more Aftershocks planned, so we’ll have to see what happens next. But it’s fair to say, it’s been fantastic – and a real privilege to work on.
Tagged: Aftershock
