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As of this very moment, you can download Sorry About Dresden Live at the dotmatrix project for free from Amie Street.
The longer you wait to download, the higher the price will go. All proceeds go to the artists. Fun, eh?
You can also download it for free from Last.fm.
Enjoy!
its 5:21am.
and i don’t know how to cry anymore.
that shit depresses me to no end.
seriously.
this aint some being mellowdramtic to be mellowdramatic shit.
i want to cry.
i was taught long ago that if i enter this game of constant competition
and competitiveness and dog eat dogness and getting your soul sucked
and 25 hour workdays and long un-approving looks in the mirror and anxiety and constant judgment — i better numb the shit outta myself.[...]
Classic quote:
[...] I have tried to get quite a bit of control, but I wasn’t totally happy with the results of that. It’s a mixture of control and good luck [...]
Sue just explained both the evolution of my world view and my approach to building a business.
I love it when a plan comes together… on its own.
Produced by DJ Green Lantern
(via Nah Right)
UPDATE: The Nigger Tape is now available online (via NappyAfro). Don’t know why it’s compressed as a .rar file, but you can decompress it with either RAR Expander (Mac) or WinRAR (PC)
Sorry to say, there’s no prize for Chris, but he does own the distinction of becoming the very first dotmatrix project musician and audience participator by shooting and uploading this short diddy of Carolina Clearwater performing at the May 22nd show.
It’s not too surprising, though; Chris paints, makes films and blogs when he’s not kicking it with his brothers in Old Stone Revue. He’s an all-around creative kinda guy.
So when you come out to a show, be sure to bring your camera. If we get enough audience participation, we’ll try to work your media into our music videos. Just be sure to tag your files with “the dotmatrix project” so we can find it wherever you drop it online.
Saying that Last.fm doesn’t have a clue in how to structure information retrieval in their own domain is the understatement of the century. I’ve become a pretty faithful user of the music service, but I have a hell of a time finding what I’m looking for with their search engine.
How bad is it? When I search for an artist (for example: Molly McGinn) I expect to get direct navigation to her artist page if there’s only one “Molly McGinn” in their artist database. Instead, I receive this result page:
Information Retrieval 101: Precision is better than recall. And if a system can’t be precise with a return, then it needs to be smart with how it displays relevant recall. In this case, since there are actually two “Molly McGinn” artist assets in their database, the recall should be limited to those two entries.
How did a query with the two terms, “molly” and “mcginn,” return artist results that don’t have both (not either) terms in their title? I tried searching both with and without quotes around the full name, but I get the same results.
It’s almost as if Last.fm reinvented the very premise of search for their own purposes, yet I can’t figure out what business or user objective they’ve supported.
Non-structured artist discovery during a precise search?
But that’s not the worst of it. Check out what the very same search query gets you in the soon to be live beta redesign:
Not only is there far too much recall, but the two most relevant returns don’t even bubble up to the top of the results page. “Molly McGinn” doesn’t appear until page 2, while “Molly McGinn and the Buster Dillys” don’t show up until… shit, I’m on page 6 of the results and it still hasn’t shown up.
The top results are now based on popularity. Who’s in charge over there? They’ve actually managed to make search far worse in this platform redesign.
Google To The Rescue
For all you frustrated Last.fm users, here’s a super simple way to work around their popularity-driven search results when you’re simply looking for a band page:
Following this method, my search for “molly mcginn” netted me these results:
It sucks that I have to step outside the domain to get solid domain results, but I have no other choice when trying to find specific pages. I’d love to close this post with a catchy one-liner to the extent of “and that’s why Google is worth so much” but this is best practice, standard approach stuff we’re dealing with here.
It’s kind of pitiful that Last.fm can’t get it right.
UPDATE: The beta site went live today and check out what I found:
Bravo, fellas.
(photo by CharlesMedia™)
dotmatrix llc. has been an operating consultancy for two years now, but not until I put the logo on our S. Elm Street door did it feel so legit.
More shots of the office with the media team editing videos:
An aside: A huge shout of thanks goes out to Scott Flora, Principle owner of blik for replacing our original door logo, free of charge from across the country, when I realized that the grey text logo I ordered got lost in the reflection when applied. There was no awkwardness, haggling or begging — Scott simply stepped up and made me feel like what was important to me was also important to him.
That’s how you secure lifelong clientèle.
Sorry About Dresden: Shake Your Fist from Sean Coon on Vimeo.
Rock.
Props to Ioannis Batsios for editing this video from footage he shot with Jason Pierce and Takele Woldu. And please try to tell me that James Hepler, on drums, isn’t a friggin’ machine!
Saddle Creek Records is the label for Sorry About Dresden, one of the bands the dotmatrix project put on this past April. Before watching this film, I knew Matt Oberst was from Omaha, but I had no idea how tight-knit and communal the Saddle Creek effort has been since 1993. A bunch of kids loving, playing, recording and distributing music evolved into the label and a group of lifelong friends that we outsiders couldn’t possibly appreciate without the back story.
Well, I’m appreciating the fuck out of them now.
We’re doing so many things differently here at DMP, yet covering so much of the same “building community” ground.
These guys ran super hard with analog recording, distribution and marketing — because it was all they had available to them at the time — to pimp each other and their community.
We’re pimping local and regional bands — some we know well, many we don’t — using state of the art live, digital recording techniques and editing software that wasn’t available to the consumer market in the 90’s. Our distribution and marketing goals are hyper local, but they’re also available for global discovery simply because of our use of the internet.
I’d bet the Lumberjack guys would’ve lost their shit back in the day playing in the sandbox we now take for granted.
It’s just so very cool to experience the story behind a living, breathing idea 15 years deep into its evolution. Thank you, Jason Kulbel and Rob Walters, for bringing Spend an Evening with Saddle Creek to life.
UPDATE: You can buy the full DVD documentary here.