Somewhere There Creative Music Festival: Main

Joe Strutt
   Music as Community: contingency, fungibility, and solidarity

talk: Friday 26 February, 7pm

Joe Strutt (as Heraclitus Akimbo

Joe Strutt is a concert attendee and citizen archivist. Since 2009, he has run a music blog called Mechanical Forest Sound, a community-based archive with more than 2,800 live recordings posted, creating a living document of ephemeral musical moments. Assuming that "independent music" isn't just boys with guitars and "culture" isn't just some sort of pageant, MFS is an investigation of a wide range of artists, reflecting on concerts as shared experiences, acts of citizenship and a chance to get down. His live recordings have been used for official releases by numerous artists, including Young Governor, Mantler, Moonwood, Skull Bong, and Zone Support. He has written for the Wavelength music series and Weird Canada.

More recently, Joe has also become a live music presenter, finding sympathetic bills for touring and local artists and bringing improvised music series Audiopollination to the all-ages, punk-inspired art extravaganza Long Winter. He is the curator and host of Track Could Bend, a monthly music series that aims to bring together musicians and audiences from different scenes to encourage a reconsideration of what constitutes "experimental" music in 2016. A long-time bedroom dabbler, he has also recently stepped out as a performing musician, releasing a tape of lo-fi ambient keyboard loops (A Part of My Inheritance, Arachnidisc Recordings) under the bandonym Heraclitus Akimbo. In December, he made his live debut at a show hosted by Somewhere There.

His talk at this year's festival will draw from these experiences, while amplifying and updating some of the themes first considered a couple years ago in his essay on Somewhere There, Everyone Knows This is Somewhere: informal creative music, space, and community, published by Weird Canada in 2014.

mechanical forest sound
track could bend
heraclitus akimbo

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