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Introduction to Reviewing Netaudio Festival Berlin 2009
Well… Now one year has passed since the Netaudio Festival Berlin 2009 – a festival which was so unique in many aspects: in the 20th anniversary year of the teardown of the Wall, a multicolored mixture with more than 100 artists from whole Europe met under the slogan “East meets West”. We were excited to invite and meet artists especially from Eastern Europe – even if this went with visa problems in some cases but which we could not solve only in one case. Many new friendships and ties were established – and existing relations updated. New projects have been generated, others were developed further. The festival surely contributed to the development of the scene – with much fewer critical voices than in the aftermaths of our festival in 2007.
This publication has developed from the idea to keep hold of some personal perspectives, interesting anecdotes and developed ideas – alongside with some theoretical thoughts as an outcome of the festival. And analogue to the colorful mixture of participants in the festival – there is also present a nice collection of texts in style, types and perspectives. Most of them are very friendly and full of (personal) enthusiasm, others are meant to increase and develop the content, framework and general setup of the festival. We are thankful for all those different intentions and directions. We can only learn by sharing our thoughts, knowledge and ideas.
To the section ‘Festival Reports’ Fernando Fonseca, Marco Donnarumma and David Domingo contributed their extended reports which contain – aside some critical aspects – many nice, funny or thoughtful anecdotes. They all depict personal impressions of the festival from different perspectives and illustrate these with some lovely pictures. Vinilette, the organizer of the Barcelona-based Festival Femelek, also retains her personal highlights of the Netaudio Festival. Furthermore she describes the female aspects of her very own festival activities – while the idea of her annual Festival Femelek is to present female artists and musicians.
In the section ‘Ideas around Netaudio‘ Raimund Reintjes from Netaudio Berlin contributed an article (unfortunately for our English readers only in German) which goes, rich in content, through the sense and nonsense of earning money within the ‘netaudio’-construction. With a fine-tooth comb, he leads the reader to some essentials of netaudio but also introduces projects and ideas regarding the relation between free culture and commercial interests. Culminating in some thoughts about possible paths for the future of netaudio, his detailed descriptions are close to the life and needs of the artists and underlined by solid experiences and numerous samples from the (netaudio) scene. Bastian Thüne describes (unfortunately for our English readers as well only in German) the current conditions, advantages and problems of netlabels in relation to digital and hybrid labels, in his contribution ‘Netlabel Update 2009’. He clarifies different label models on the basis of many quotations and examples. The article about Netaudio London was written by two of the core organizers of the London Festival crew – Andi Studer and Matt Spendlove (cenatus.org). They reflect the central elements of netaudio festivals and also present their Netaudio London 2011 manifesto. We’re already looking forward to see and support them – hereby with some intense recommendation for their upcoming festival announcements on www.netaudiolondon.cc. Magali Rossi discusses in her contribution ‘Fair(sex) in Netaudio’. She highlights the need for a common space for men and women where discrimination over gender, whether positive or negative, is left at the door. Jenz Steiner and Konrad Behr (German) describe emphatically (and in the same way impressively) their personal path to and through ‘netaudio’ – and what is important to them in this context.
In the section ‘Academic Articles’ Patryk Galuszka presents selected results and tables from his research, for which he interviewed more than 300 netlabel activists. The article ‘Innovators and DIY cultural production’ with his extremely valuable research informs us about the geographical spreading of netlabels and their operators, about musical genres offered, their fields of activity, the number of releases and the licenses of the examined netlabels. Antina Michels delivers in her article ‘On- and Offline Interlacing and Community Formation in the Netaudio Scene’ insights into her ethnographic research for which she constantly communicated regularly with nearly a dozen activists of Berlin and London netlabels over a period of one and a half years. Her paper addresses the recent digital music phenomenon ‘netaudio’ and analyses the relationship between online and offline realms. Her paper’s focus is on an internet-related form of ‘community of practice’.
The Netwaves team presents in the section ‘Podcasts & Interviews’ their interview recordings with artists (Bad Comfort, D.Soul, Pheek, Peak), on of the organizers of Netaudio Berlin (Raimund Reintjes) and netlabel operators (Silvio/Crazy Language, David Domingo/netaudio.es) – as well as music from netaudio artists.
A cordial thank you goes at all contributors and editors (Raimund Reintjes, Jon Dickens, Geraldine de Bastion, Chris Box, Matt Spendlove, Geoff Stahl, Alessio Alencar, Mark Davies and Sarah Ladkani) of this publication. Loads of fun with reading the texts, spreading the news, listening to interviews and music and remembering the Festival wish you
Antina Michels and the team of Netaudio Berlin
Introduction to Reviewing Netaudio Festival Berlin 2009 von Antina Michels steht unter einer Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Lizenz.
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[…] This publication has developed from the idea to keep hold of some personal perspectives, interesting anecdotes and developed ideas – alongside with some theoretical thoughts as an outcome of the festival. And analogue to the colorful mixture of participants in the festival – there is also present a nice collection of texts in style, types and perspectives. Most of them are very friendly and full of (personal) enthusiasm, others are meant to increase and develop the content, framework and general setup of the festival.…..Read more […]