Blue Stone Jones' Electronic Music Podcast

In the midst of vast culture-level arguments over digital rights and intellectual property, my friend Matt Jones does something incredibly cool:  he releases a bi-weekly podcast of his original electronic music compositions, Blue Stone Jones.  His so-called "musical sketchbook" features recordings of his Live PA sets, various studio experiments, and whatever else he manages to cook up with laptop and accessories, delivered neatly to your computer for absolutely nothing.  If you have twenty minutes in your week you could fill with tasteful and evocative electronic music, I highly recommend that you subscribe to his podcast.

He also publishes his work under a Creative Commons 3.0 license, which means that you can share it with as many people as you like, so long as you don't alter or sell it.  As someone who releases all of my own music under a Creative Commons license, I really resonate with Matt's modus operandi - and for that reason, I've started a collaborative project with him, somewhat akin to The Postal Service's album-by-correspondence (songwriter Ben Gibbard and electronic composer Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) put together an album a few years ago by sending each other tracks in the mail - long ago, before the age of services like YouSendIt.com and Zshare.net allowed us to do these things electronically).

I've been using live loop sampling more and more in my performances recently, the consequence of which is that I've accrued a fantastic amount of short loop phrases that have been just languishing in my computer, waiting for some clever and daring remixer to cook up something with them.  My particular looping pedal, the Boss RC-50, offers three channels of recording banks for each patch - meaning I can record and loop three different sound samples and play them back individually or together.  So I've been sending Matt these blocks of three short audio clips at a time, and he's been tinkering with them, adding synthesizer pads and wild drum programming, enriching the tonal palette of the bits and pieces that I've fed him.  The result is pretty cool - he's featured his first two elaborations in the latest podcast, which you can listen to or download here.  And of course, it just wouldn't be full-thrush primate mutual grooming without him tipping a nod to my music and my blog in his own blog, here.  This is only the beginning of what promises to be a very enjoyable long-distance musical relationship.  I have to admit, I think his solo work is more impressive - but I suspect we'll ripen over time. 

And meanwhile, I encourage you to check out Matt's piano work in the band Blue Stone Jones, a jazz and funk ensemble that is definitely worth your listening.  So go do it.