Last Friday Joel Schalit and I gave our presentation at the EMP pop conference. It went reasonably well, despite a technical complication that led to the musical bed we'd set up starting late and therefore getting out of sync with the words of our text. Earlier that afternoon, however, we'd made the short trip to Seattle's superb independent music station KEXP in order to speak about our topic for possible later use in one of the station's short audio documentaries. And then we got to go on air, where, with Kevin Cole, a wonderful DJ, at the controls, the bed worked perfectly.

Later that weekend, our gracious host Vance Galloway found a way to distill the four-hour stream in the KEXP archives into a sound file comprising only our twenty-minute segment. Be advised, if you listen -- it's in Apple's AAC format, BTW -- that I'd had way too little sleep and way too much coffee -- I was in Seattle, after all -- that day, amping up my nervous energy to the point where I ended up sounding like I'd been making recreational use of a dentist's office. Joel, who was so tired that I feared he would start nodding off, revealed his radio experience by sounding calm and collected. Oh well. At least the content came through clearly enough.

In closing, I must give a shout out to some folks whose words played a major role in the development of our presentation and whom time constraints prevented us from properly acknowledging at the EMP: K-Punk, Simon Reynolds, The Stranger's Charles Mudede, Steven Shaviro, Tomas Palermo, and, last but not least, our host Vance Galloway. Joel knows enough about dub to fill their footprints, but I feel like I'm wearing baby shoes in comparison.

Tags: clips, conference, friends, media, music, politics, theory
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