Basspistol v 4.20

Welcome back earthling!

It’s been a long time coming. 5 years of silence is…

My name is Set, i’m a co-founder of The Outernational Music Syndicate and currently the main contributor. I could make up all sorts of excuses as to why it’s been silent for so long, I could go on and ramble about the good ol’ past, and how together with a couple of people we founded this syndicate in a chat-conversation and made it real on January 7th 2010. Or how at first the idea was to create a booking agency that would be the exact opposite of everything that sucked with booking agencies. I could continue on about how we were given this awesome server by Alexander Poltorak and started to distribute music. But all I will do in that regard is to emphasise Alsenet.com because really Alsenet.com, from our standpoint, deserves all the love we can give them. (To suport Alsenet, share their Software with your neighbour!)

However, this post is about the present

The present of Basspistol and eventually of music. The past and the future cannot be contained in a frame. They operate like dreams: their form, meaning and relevance are subjective and personal. They are visions that are oh so difficult to transmit. But the present… That! …is something we can hold on to. Something we can affect, in affect with effect. Today the music industry is ruled by a very strange set of data. It has different names but represents the same values: “likes”, “shares”, “favorits”, “retweets”… As if music was a measurable artform on a human scale. This illusion is reinforced by the recurrent televised competitions where creativity is tamed, bent, violated and normalised for the greater consumer’s good. Countless web-logs are using the oldest tricks in the books: appeal to your guts, twinkle with your genitals and feed you with sugar. To find out which kind of sweetness you prefer, data is captured, statistics are analysed and the conclusion these lead to form the next publication. Don’t get me wrong, I’m an amateur SysAdmin, I LOVE stats. Making A-B tests to see what works on most of you or what doesn’t gives me a god-like feeling: control! But when it comes to Art, does it really matter what the fuck everyone thinks? Well, if you need to fill up that excel sheet with reassuring ciphers that bring food on your table, it probably does. But to me it doesn’t. And hence I see an opportunity in this, that is not given to any- and everyone, that I decided to capture: Spending free time and energy on something i enjoy doing. Namely listen to rare contemporary music from all azimuths and communicate what it makes me feel.

What we do isn’t special

It is how we do it that is different. You may say: “But this is just a blog” and you are right, it is. It is just like the nytimes.com or MTV.com; we write articles in a web-log, where we share links with pictures and videos, hoping you might want to read them. Except, well, it is hosted on a provider that respect your freedom, the domain name is provided by a registrar that respect your freedom, and all the tools to build it are forged by communities that respect your freedom. And the curators, like me, only care about one thing: the relation between the art and the human, when the artist is free to create and the human is free to feel. No “accept these cookies” strings attached.

It takes great detachement and economical freedom to create something personal; detachement from the expectations of society regarding what your personality should be, and economical freedom to enable the time and energy required to develop said personality. Thanks to the free software community and the dedication of fire-soul enhanced humanoids such as Lynn Smeria it has been possible to render this page on a very particular premiss, that is only given to humans: Friendship cultivation. The free software community enabled the machine that this page is rendered on, and Lynn created The rusty metal heart of the Basspistol release machine.

So what’s next?

Hopefully in your company, a lot. But if i spoiled it now, would you come back tomorrow to read the next post?

Yours, with friendly regards,