Just saw the film, Rip, last week­end. The movie explores new cre­ative modes of music-making (and other art forms) enabled by present day tech­nolo­gies and cul­tural inter­ests. It also uses this path into the cre­ative world to cover most of the present day strug­gles with copy­right and notions of own­er­ship of “intel­lec­tual prop­erty.” Although Rip addresses a wide-range of top­ics and ground, one of the points it dri­ves home bet­ter than any­thing is the notion of remix­ing and mashups as art-form (or Read more […]

Lots of news lately about Radio­head offer­ing its newest album as a down­load (choose your own price). Saul Williams and Trent Reznor decided to do the same with their new album. They’ve made a lot of head­lines, though Issa (Jane Siberry) has offered self-determined pric­ing for her music for some time. We’ve been offer­ing our music online in down­load options of free or pur­chasable as high qual­ity MP3/Ogg for­mats or phys­i­cal CD for the last five years. I’m sure many other artists have offered their Read more […]

UnKind­ness Of Ravens recently may have been heard by way of CKDU 88.1 in Hal­i­fax, Nova Sco­tia. Ron Bates’s The Threat is an “eclec­tic show of noise, jazz, indie rock, and other avant garde weird­ness,” which pre­sented (among excit­ing bits of thumb-piano joy from Konono No.1 and well-placed rock) some UKOR too. For­tu­nately for those who missed it, there is a pod­cast (episode 35 from 19 Aug 2006). It’s not just back-scratching that I’m rec­om­mend­ing down­load­ing the The Threat pod­cast (more like skin Read more […]

UnKind­ness Of Ravens is slow but alive and well.

Unkind­ness Of Ravens musi­cal aspi­ra­tions tran­scend nor­malcy once again, even cell phones will bleed with aural anar­chy! Dis­gusted by the sickly sweet ring­tones that came pre­set into my cell­phone, I sought out to find a new one… my mis­sion ended very near to where it began: in a sea of bub­ble gum pop designed for a yup­pie world. I use a cell phone as you may have deduced, and I am embar­rassed using this tech­nol­ogy, largely due to the ring­tones. I decided to com­pose my own! The moti­va­tion for Read more […]

UKOR per­formed a sur­prise show in California’s old-town Eureka. Every­one was enthused with the high-energy improv (and few bath­room breaks) expected as an inte­gral part of any UKOR per­for­mance. The instru­ments were dusted and some new tools joined in the nota­tional surgery. Unfor­tu­nately (due to a flask­full of other com­mit­ments) the stan­dard full UKOR lineup was not present. How­ever, the band’s most recent addi­tion, Ms. Momb, took up the slack (with­out using slacks even). A treat to some of the best Read more […]

Happy New Year! We are all alive and well. Some of us go by dif­fer­ent names. We don’t know yours.

Tragedy!! Lost mas­ters! UKOR loses its foun­da­tion and pleads to the blood in its veins (or sweat on its brows) for a res­o­lu­tion. But none will come. I’m speak­ing of the first UKOR mas­ter record­ing, honed, mixed and (patho­log­i­cally lis­tened to) in pre­vi­ous years. Yes, the mas­ter record­ing of Shoji Mahog’s Biglit­tle Room as well as its sources has van­ished. It is inter­est­ing to note, that this tragedy seems to have wiped all traces of news before 13 April 1999 clean from the anals of UKOR his­tory. Read more […]