That’s the song Scarecrow, my fave track off the debut album by Red State Soundsystem, Ghosts In A Burning City.

In continuing our investigation of being an artist in the future-present, I organised an interview with the man behind the moniker, Dr Joshua Ellis.

I’ve been listening to some of these songs for many years now, as you’ve uploaded works in progress to your personal blog.  In fact, I’m not sure when you first adopted the moniker Red State Soundsystem.  Let’s start with talking about why you chose that name:

Originally I was just doing stuff under my own name. But I wanted an identity that could be me, other people — pretentiously, a collective.

At the time, Cansei de Ser Sexy was just coming up, and I liked their acronym (CSS). I wanted something that was also a Web acronym, so I thought about it - HTML, PHP, RSS… hmm. And then it just hit me — Red State Soundsystem.

I also like it because I dig the idea of African/Jamaican soundsystems, those big mobile DJ rigs on flatbed pickup trucks. I liked the idea of a middle American version of that. Of course, to everyone outside of America, “red state” sounds Communist, and that’s cool too.

I guess, ultimately, I just liked it once I’d come up with it.

So you don’t know this, but several years ago you provided the soundtrack to a weekend my then-girlfriend (now wife!) spent in a country bed’n’breakfast.  Your music was the only thing on my iPod she liked.  Have you had any other stories like this?  Does it seem strange that even though you’re only just now releasing the album, some of us have had a long relationship with your songs?

It does seem strange, mainly because my goofy model of releasing music couldn’t have really existed before, say, 1998. I’ve kind of treated this music like software - dropping unfinished “alpha” versions here and there, refining it, and finally putting out definitive versions. I don’t plan on doing 2.0 versions, though. This is the final product.

I mean, hell, it seems odd to me that people have relationships with this music. I’m the sort of person that assumes that nobody’s really paying attention to what I do. Which is what’s cool about releasing this album - the response has been really great from long-standing fans and new fans alike.

I note with much interest that you’re selling digital copies directly over PayPal, and via iTunes and Amazon. Do you think CDs are now a ‘fetish item’?

I think CDs are the last vestige of 20th century ideas about media. They’ll never be fetish items the way vinyl records are, but there are still going to be people a decade from now grousing because they can’t buy new records on CD. But fuck those people, right?

In previous incarnations, such as writing for Mondo 2000, you were part of the team behind Mperia, an online music service that was pro-artist, but ultimately before it’s time.  Watching the rise of iTunes, which disproved all the naysayers that said no one would ever pay for music online, must be a bit rough.

Your interview on the RU Sirius show is something I’ve made several aspirant musicians listen to.  What’s it like reflecting upon that period now?  What lessons have you learnt that you can apply today?

You know, the day after Bitpass’s CEO called me and told me Bitpass and Mperia were shutting down, I went down to the store late at night to buy cigarettes and Diet Coke and the new issue of WIRED was on the stands, with Beck on the cover: THE FUTURE OF DIGITAL MUSIC. I wanted to knock the newsstand over and storm out of the place and turn my life to Jesus.  But I didn’t; I bought the magazine, cut the cover off, and wrote on it with a Sharpie: DO BETTER NEXT TIME.

Mperia was a great idea that was two or three years ahead of its time. And yeah, it kind of sucks to see people getting rich parroting stuff I said at the beginning of the decade, and I was bitter for a long time. But I learned a hell of a lot about business over there. First and foremost: never, ever, ever put anything creative or exciting or dangerous in the hands of accountants and middle managers. They will find a way to fuck it up and file the edges down to nothing.

Micropatronage is something you’ve explored before with your writing.  Have you considered trying something similar with your music, a themed EP perhaps?  What do you think this might look like?

Funny you mention that — the other day I was kicking around the idea of using Kickstarter to fund a trip to Africa to record with local musicians. I’d love to do that. Aside from weird stuff like that, though… I don’t really need patronage to record/release music. I own my own gear, so it doesn’t cost me anything anymore. New gear would be nice, though.

While we’re throwing out naughties-era ‘net buzzwords..  CROWDSOURCING!  You’ve been looking for people to help film a clip for “Scatterlings + Refugees”.  Tell our glorious readers here how they can get involved..  Wait, here’s the link to your post on the subject.. anything more you want to add?

Yes! I’d very much like to do this, and I’d like to do it on the first of February. So wherever you are in the world on February 1st, go outside and film yourself lip-syncing to my song and send me the video and I’ll edit it into the official video for the track.

Let’s talk online presence..  Does MySpace still matter?  What about 8Track?  Or is it just about Facebook?  (People, join the Fan Group here).  Can the kids follow the band on Twitter?  And will you be releasing any remixes of your songs as ring tones?

I don’t think MySpace matters much anymore…except to musicians. If MySpace just admitted it — said ‘Hey, Facebook’s won, let’s focus on MySpace Music and get rid of everything else’ — they might do well. But they won’t.

Social networks matter, but only by default; you have to be on Facebook and MySpace, but I’m not entirely convinced that simply maintaining a presence there is enough. Twitter, absolutely. Twitter is great for keeping yourself out in the world, and I mean that both in the cynical marketing sense and also to keep you connected with the people who are, at least in theory, your audience.

And yeah, I’m probably going to be releasing ringtones, but not remixes — original ringtones. I have a weird fascination with microcompositions, like Eno doing the Windows theme.

You call Vegas home.  How has living in one of the stranger cities on Earth informed your song writing?

Oh, God. Yeah, Vegas has been home for a while, even though I’m not from here - I grew up primarily in north Texas, and I’ve lived all over America and even in Turkey for a year when I was a kid. It’s funny, because a few of the reviews I’ve gotten so far on the album think that the “burning city” in the title refers to Vegas, which it doesn’t. (It’s a line from a Stephen Vincent Benet poem.) The “burning city” is, I think, the globalist world - the endless cityscape of the 21st century.

Vegas is a bizarre place to live if you’re not involved with the casinos, which I’m not at all. It’s like Flint, Michigan without all the bohemian charm. :-)  I guess it informs my songwriting because there’s so much weird fucking human drama playing out here all the time, on every street corner.

If I’ve been stalking you right, you’ve got something similar to the Gorillaz in the works.  What’s the deal there?

Well, a while back I was playing around with the idea of having Red State Soundsystem be a virtual band like the Gorillaz - never showing my real face, doing narrative animated videos, etc. But I kind of gave that up. Damon Albarn has Jamie Hewlett. I don’t.

You’ve publicly criticized Cory Doctorow’s pushing of Creative Commons, but do you think Bono’s stance of late has been even more annoying/stupefying?

Well, first let me say that I’m massively in favor of the Creative Commons. I’ve released work through the CC licenses and I was actually there for their launch party in SF. I think that Creative Commons licensing is a great choice. But there’s the key word: choice.

What bothers me about Cory’s stance — and the stance of “copyfighters” in general — is that they talk an awful lot about the rights of consumers, and very little about the rights of artists.

Look: it took me around three years to record this album, not counting the almost twenty years before that of learning to play and writing songs and all that. I think that if people enjoy my work, it’s absolutely fair for me to ask them to pay me ten measly bucks for it. I’m not gouging anybody. Nor am I going around suing anybody for “stealing” my music. But I’d very much like you to pay for it if you enjoy it.

I’ve never understood why copyfighters don’t follow the example of the Free Software movement. Open source geeks refuse to use software that has licenses they don’t agree with. And most open source geeks don’t go around trumpeting that you should steal commercial software, right?

So why don’t copyfighters stop bitching at record labels and bands and just listen exclusively to the wide range of Creative Commons-licensed or copyright-free music out there? It’s free, easy to find, and unlike open software, you don’t usually have to hunt down dependent software packages to rock out with it.

Now, Bono: I happen to really like Bono. I think he’s a remarkable and very clever man who has done a great deal of good in the world - not just through his activism, but by simply making music that makes a whole lot of people very happy. People fall in love to U2 songs, and listen to them to deal with the pain of falling out of love; they play U2 songs at their funerals; they crank The Joshua Tree at full volume when they’re driving and it makes them feel alive.

Bono (and his band-mates) did that. Their job is to make music. And I think they’ve gotten deservedly rich doing that job, whether you like them or not. I don’t begrudge Bono one cent of his fortune, and I don’t think he has any moral obligation to not want to make any more money from his work…  any more than, say, Adobe ought to give Photoshop away for free now because they’ve already gotten rich selling it. I wish we lived in a world where that made sense, but I don’t.

So I think the argument that Bono’s a jerk-off because rich rock stars shouldn’t care about copyrights is ludicrous.

Having said that: I think his solutions to these issues are also ludicrous. He’s a smart, informed guy, but he’s wrong here. I’d love to sit and drink a Guinness with the man and talk to him about it sometime, because at this point I think I’m as much of an expert on these matters as anybody else in the world. Bono, call me!


Now, I’m just going to throw these out there..

Who points closer to the future - Amanda Palmer or Lady Gaga?

God, I hope it’s Amanda Palmer. Lady Gaga is a famous person who also happens to make completely unremarkable house music. She’s not bad musically, but she’s not interesting, and I’m really bored with people who exist just to be famous and be icons and fabulous and all that Andy Warhol bullshit.

Amanda, on the other hand, is an incredibly gifted musician and songwriter who is building a model for DIY musicians simply by doing her thing and existing, and I love her for that. (I’m also a fan of her music.) So I hope more people follow her lead.

Do you think we will ever, or indeed should, get off-world?

Yes, but not until we figure out how to offload a human mind into an artificial storage/consciousness unit. The math is all wrong for any other kind of space travel, except to maybe Mars and the Moon. (Did you know I went to Space Camp? I totally did. And I’m obsessed with transhumanism and posthumanism and all that Eric Drexler / Ray Kurzweil stuff.)

In conclusion, paint me a picture of the most perfect gig you could ever possibly play:

Opening for Radiohead, at any time, anywhere.

——————————————————————————————————-

Red State Soundsystem’s debut album Ghost In A Burning City out now.

Buy it direct from the artist, or via iTunes or Amazon.

Massive Attack (w/ Hope Sandoval) - Paradise Circus (from Heligoland, out Feb. 9th) [Via http://twitter.com/haute_muffy via debauchette]

Auto start, yeah. Sorry.

          *AHEM* Not, I repeat, NSFW. Now remember, as adults you must be sheperded like children in a thunderstorm. Fear your own shadow. Don’t talk to strangers. Fall in line. And for fuckity fuck’s sake, stay away from the Satanic lust beast (possible band name, yes) that’s hiding beneath your evil evil evil foreskin (if you were lucky enough to keep yours) and/or (Hermy/Trans friends, I feel you) skulking between your apocalyptic labia. Hands inside the ride at all times. Voices down. Behave. *cough cough*

          Trip Hop royalty, Massive Attack, are at it again (http://tinyurl.com/yaw977g). Which is grand news, no doubt, but what’s really got me going is this vid (Directed by Toby-Dye, starring legendary porn priestess Georgina Spelvin and sporting scenes from the throwback porn masterpiece, The Devil in Miss Jones) My own personal war against ageism is bolstered by this fucking wonderfully fucking beautiful fucking thing.

• From the Stereogum post (Because they’re better at this than I am…pip pip):

          “Titanic if it were a porn documentary,” where if instead of flashing back to cute scenes with Leo, Old Rose was flashing back to money-shots with Disco Stu. A sweet old woman starts the show by describing why she never really made it as a prostitute (typical grandma small talk), but how she really shined when a camera was on. Sexually speaking. Her reminiscences and descriptions of the sensations of physical attraction and orgasms are cut with actual footage from her “fuck film,” so strap in for ’70s-styled blowjobs and all the associated trimmings (or, lack there of). Massive Attack and Hope provide a seductively spacious soundtrack, but your attention will likely be directed elsewhere the first time through.

          In a society…nay, world where sensuality & sexuality are publically ruled by youngsters who know the least about sex, it’s refreshing to have such absurdities thrown back in our collective face. Britney Miley Gaga VI isn’t sexy. That’s right: Grandma knows the score. And grandma gets it on. And she has a thing or two to teach us if only we can get past the silly idea of her sexuality somehow being creepy.

‘Lucky’ is the collaboration between Melbourne based ‘All India Radio’ and animation company ‘Dee Pee Studios’.

It involves a painstaking animation technique, whereby the team paints in the air with glow sticks, frame after to frame to create entire sequences of animation, sometimes taking a whole night to shoot.

I’m going to call this “the little festival that could”.  LOLA (London Ontario Live Arts) fest in London Ontario is happening now, having just launched last night.  Throughout the core of the city are art installations based on the theme of light/ darkness.  Today begins the music portion of the fest as well, with VIctoria Park hosting 2 stages, a mainstage and the trans/media stage.    VJ POMO and myself will be VJing on the mainstage all weekend …

But what really struck me other than the usual amibitious work being done by fesitval organizers is how much tech they’ve included.  lolafest.com/live will be streaming content online for the next 48 hrs, not from just the videography on the stage, but from LOLA staff (and even artists) equiped with nokia cellphones capable of streaming live videofeeds (let’s call it live documentary) via a huge transciever unit called the C.O.W. which is set up in the park.   We’re going to be hooked up with one of these phones later today to add our experience to the LOLAness.

Also (and this is the first time I’ve ever seen then used in Canada in person)  LOLA fest folk added QR coding to all the signage (each artists station has a sign like in the pic — the one above being for our VJ sets on the mainstage).  Linking the art to digital mobile content was a fantastic idea, allowing the viewer to investigate more about the art and the artists.

I’ll be semi-live blogging on my tumblr page all weekend. As they’re also setting me up with a wireless account that I can access right from where I’m VJing.  THanks to the C.O.W.  I’ll find out what it stands for and edit this :).

** the COW is simply. the cell on wheels.  hmph was hoping for something more dramatic.

I was cruising along the lastest post on HackAday last night when I came upon this video.

An artist releasing their first album is always and exciting time,anyone who’s participated in cultural production can relate to that feeling.  But kudos to audio artist Moldover for doing it in such an innovative manner.   Printing the CD liner into his own custome circuit boards is such a fantastic idea and not just for their aesthetic.   Actually converting each CD case into an optical-thermin is sheer brilliance if you ask me!  And not content with releasing something that’s merely an electronic toy, he pops a 1/8’” minijack in there so it become an instrument that can be used for recording, amplying etc.

I’m a bit smitten by the idea of this.  A clever melding of form and function.  I’ve already ordered a copy for myself.

The world’s first meta-time-strategy game.

It’s like Starcraft with time travel. And it deals with paradoxes.

After I have a cup of coffee, perhaps I’ll be able to explain why this brings me so much joy. Mostly having to do with prepping our brains to actually deal with such things, and being self-aware enough to understand the impacts of things in the past and therefore potentially how our current actions affect the future. Most of the time we just wing it, and come up with the reasoning later. This… this is good.

More videos and explainations here.

(via yoyojedi : thanks for making my morning!)

It’s the early 21st century.  You discover a new TV show when someone searches twitter for the usage of a new term of the zeitgeist, “funemployed”;  because they’ve named their show that.

Because keyword searching on twitter is all they really need to do in order to market it, to make it viral.

Except it’s not on broadcast or cable TV, it’s on YouTube.

They’ve had the idea for the show, knuckled down, made the thing and uploaded it.

You are impressed.  You notice how much it has improved from the first episode.  You instantly recall the earlier eps of Pure Pwnage and how that grew to become an internet sensation.

You become ever curious, so decide to ask the makers of the show some questions.  Because this is the 21st Century all that requires is a direct message on twitter.

They graciously agree to a QnA and you post the results.  (You aren’t quite sure why you write the intro in the second-person;  you decide to reference Stross’s Halting State and then run the QnA)

Funemployed is one of the best shows I’ve seen on YouTube.  How did it come to be?

Thanks! Funemployed started out in its planning stages over a year and a half ago.  After college I took a year off to save up money and then moved to Chicago in June 2007.  When I got here a friend told me it’d be hard to find work for about 3 months — The 3 Month Curse.  I scoffed at the time, but really couldn’t find work and ended up having to work crappy temp jobs and promotions out in public to make rent.  My friends who also moved to the city found the same problem, having to take up unpaid internships and temp jobs until something landed.

A friend of mine, David L. Andrews, who is also inspiration for one of the characters in the show, described it as being “Funemployed”, which I thought was hilarious, and my girlfriend at the time, Courtney Lane and I thought might be a good basis for a musical or a TV Show.  After all, so many of my favorite movies and TV shows target certain times of people’s lives and rites of passage, i.e. High School Graduation, freshman year of college, getting married and having kids; but what about that year right after college?  When you realize after all the hard work you did in school didn’t teach you a thing about actually going out and and making your way in the world?

My neighbor, improviser Alex Harris (Lockwood) and I decided we wanted to do something creative with our time and express the frustrations of our post college lives, and started planning out characters based on people we knew who eventually became the guys you see in the show.  My friends from college, filmmaker and actor Michael Lippert (Jay) and his wife, actor Kate Carson-Groner (Amy) moved to the city as well, and we all started collaborating writing scripts.  It went on like this until we had about a season’s worth of episodes written, and then we met up with some old college friends, filmmaker Christopher TK Coyne and Producer Katey Selix, and sequential artist Dan Hale (Bill) and started making Funemployed a reality.

The production value is particularly impressive.  Can you tell us a bit about the equipment and software you’re using to create it?

The production value is thanks to the efforts and abilities of Christopher TK Coyne and Michael Lippert.  Chris is basically a one man film crew, and though he lives in Milwaukee, and travels all over shooting an array of projects, still makes the time to come to Chicago to film Funemployed.  Chris is a proud owner of a RED Camera, which allows us to film at up to 4 times HD quality.  The camera has an ability to film incredibly beautiful imagery without necessarily needing a lot of lighting setups, although he is responsible for that as well. We film mainly on the RED, and also film pickups and smaller scenes with Michael Lippert’s HVX camera, which shoots HD as well, just without the same ability and depth of field as the RED.  The editing is thanks to Michael, who works full time at Cutters, a posthouse here in Chicago.  He works primarily with Final Cut, and does an excellent job making sure we all look good.  Both filmmakers bring an immense amount of passion and professionalism to Funemployed that really made this project what it is today.

What’s your rough budget per episode?

We operate on a shoestring budget.  We’re Funemployed after all.  But we do try to use our surroundings and capabilities to our advantage.  We try to use Chicago based artists for music and locations for shooting as much as we can.

We offer free advertising through our show and our website, http://www.funemployedchicago.com, in return for allowing us to utilize assets of other artists and companies.  Our biggest advantage has been having Chris Coyne on board, and having the equipment at hand.  We mainly spend money on lunch and props, so we each chip in when the episode is over.

The Internet has been providing superior entertainment to commercial TV for a while now.  In particular I’m thinking of shows like The Guild and Pure Pwnage.  Are these shows that influenced you to try something yourself?

Truthfully, when we originally started talking about the concept for the show, we weren’t as into the webseries world as one would think.  We just wrote what we thought would be funny and hoped that somehow we’d be able to make a show that looked professional and worth our time.  However, as we have started making Funemployed happen, we have become aware of shows that draw a strong parallel to the type of show we are trying to do.  Shows like The Guild, We Need Girlfriends and others are similar in feel, but we didn’t necessarily draw as much inspiration from existing shows on the web.

If not them, then what did inspire you?

People tell us all the time that Funemployed has a strong similarity to Flight of the Conchords or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  And it’s true, we love these shows and did draw inspiration from them.  One thing we dealt with in the planning stages of the show was, “OK, we’ve got four guys and a girl, how do we not make this ‘Sunny’?” But I think we’ve tried to develop characters that are hopefully memorable and based on ourselves.  One thing we’ve tried to do to separate this show from others is developing a heightened sense of reality; a feeling of life or death in every mundane or otherwise ordinary scenario.  And many of the situations are based off of real life experiences.  Trying to hit on a girl at an office temp job, having things stolen at a house party, passing out with my shoes on, trying to grow a beard unsuccessfully; these scenarios are based on our lives and then exaggerated to ridiculous heights.  I constantly ask people to share stories about what their lives were like when they were unemployed, or stories from being employed with awful jobs as well to draw inspiration.  But I think that’s what makes the show so fun, is that it is rooted in reality while still having a sense of the ludicrous in it.

Now that YouTube will share revenue with it’s “top creators” do you think it’s become a viable medium to work in?  Or are you just putting this out there for free in order to raise your profile and get paid work down the road?

Getting paid to film Funemployed would be awesome.  Do I think it will happen? Maybe not, but I think that Youtube has proven itself to be a viable resource for young unknown creatives and people across the world to get their stuff seen.  And you can see a number of people who have made careers for themselves purely from YouTube fame.  I think we all do this not expecting anything but to make the best thing we possibly can.  We are all very dedicated and passionate about the show and want to do it as long as we can come up with funny ideas and a good story.  And we have a blast filming it.

Gen Y seems to be coping a lot of flack in the media as the generation that’s had it too good and never had to struggle.  Yet your show is all about graduating and looking for employment just as the economy is collapsing.  Do you see the parallels between now and the early 90s, when the young Gen Xers were known as Slackers?

One thing I think has been incredibly bizarre is that when we started writing this show, it was just about us having trouble finding work.  It had nothing to do with the onset of the current recession, just about our personal experiences.  It was more about us being theatre and film majors graduating without the ability to get a decent paying job right away.  It was probably sometime in the winter of ‘08 that I had even heard of a recession, and people still weren’t taking it very seriously.  So with the economic climate the way it has become, suddenly the idea of Funemployed became even more poignant and accessible to a wider audience than we had ever planned on.  ”Funemployed” suddenly has become a sort of buzzword all over the media, even put into Urban Dictionary, and here we have a show about exactly that.  I would never take credit for coming up with the word “funemployed”, after all I took the idea from something my friend randomly said back in June of ‘07, but now you see it in newspapers and on TV, and it’s exciting to be making this series when it’s so relevant to the times.

I think you can draw a lot of parallels from generation to generation.  I think the adjustment from college life, where you are led and facilitated to do the work that hopefully you are able to continue doing in a professional setting, to actually being in the real world, where everything you do is on your own, is a pretty jarring experience.  No one’s holding your hand anymore, noone’s telling you what to do; at first it seems like permanent summer vacation.  But when you realize that this isn’t a vacation, this is your life, and you need to get up off your ass and get your shit together (I mean hopefully we all come to this conclusion rapidly after getting out of college), it can be pretty weird.  And that adjustment period is nothing that we haven’t all experienced in some way or another.

So if Generation X were a bunch of slackers, what is our generation? Boomerang Kids? The Internet Generation?  I don’t know, but I think technology has changed things for both good and bad.  You can easily apply for jobs online, but so can everyone.  So even though there’s that ease in applying for things, the competition is much higher than it might have been twenty years ago.  I think each generation struggles in its own way.  But honestly I am pretty lazy.

Do you dream of being the next Kevin Smith, the “slacker” made good?

All of us on the creative team have different goals for our careers. Really all I want is to be able to support myself with what I love to do. I think that’s what all of us want. Michael and Chris are definitely geared towards being successful filmmakers, while Kate and I would love to be more in front of the camera or on stage. I know that our main concern is to always be pushing ourselves and growing as artists. We’d all love to have the opportunity to keep working together in the future and work on projects that we all find as entertaining as this. I think to be as widely recognized as Kevin Smith would be cool, but we’re just doing what we love right now. It has been such an awesome experience, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see an idea we had almost two years ago finally snap into reality. If we can continue doing stuff like this until we’re old, we’ll be happy people.

Looking forward, how many episodes of Funemployed do you have planned?  Any hints as to what adventures we might be seeing?

We’ve got at least a season and a half of episodes written.  We’re in the middle of wrapping up production on Episode 3, “There Will Be Beards”, and Episode 4, “Dark Ted”.  We’ll also be dropping a Funemployed parody music video later this month.  As far as the story arc goes, you can expect plenty more roommate rivalry, a slew of different crappy jobs, more insight into mind of Lockwood, and maybe even a little romance.  We’re excited to continue making Funemployed, and making it as awesome as we can.