artists
info
marty segal



Label

Musiciam is a net label that has been providing free music online since 1999. The label is dedicated to providing listeners with a free online resource with the intention that fans will be happy to pay for live performances.

The artists involved here have commonly been bought together by a shared sense of humour... a passion for frisbee... or a certain perspective regarding music and the arts in general.

Manifesto

The music presented here must fulfill at least one of the following criteria:
  1. It's been recorded at a live event.
  2. It's been recorded in one take in a studio.
  3. It contains improvised or spontaneous elements that make it unrepeatable.
  4. All other files associated with this recording have been lost or discarded.
There must be something about the recording that makes it utterly unique, something that prevents it being worked on or tampered with any further. Multi-tracked versions of the music found on this site are not dormantly resting on a hard drive somewhere waiting to be reawakened by the click of a mouse button.

History

In the beginning, recordings were played live on to a stereo DAT machine in one take. There was no presequencing. Overdubbing was not an option. A single element could not be redone, retouched, rehashed... it was all or nothing.

For that reason the recordings became postcards from a moment in time, snapshots of a feeling. It was felt that this was a special quality worth preserving when the music was considered in context with others from that period (early 90's).

The development of electronic recording techniques had meant that even acoustic music was laboriously overdubbed, over produced and frequently worked upon until the very life it had seemed to have been wrung out of it.

The recordings found here remain precoius because, like with early jazz recordings, they transmit a feeling from a specifc place in time that otherwise, no-one else would have been able to witness. They represent a moment where the fusion of the artists involved created a feeling that was distinct, unrepeatable and worthy of a souvenir.

Alongside the recordings that have been permeating cyberspace, limited edition cd's have been released, predominantly distributed through live events.


Working Methods - The sampler that was the backbone to many of the early recordings obviously had the capacity to save sounds but for years that facility was never used. At the end of recording sessions, following a short pause and an intake of breath, the sampler would be turned off, wiping its memory of all traces of the music just made... sealing that session in time like a tomb beneath a pyramid... where the treasure would lay awaiting the music explorers wishing to discover it.

The sampler would be loaded up with loops and sounds recorded via a microphone, each one therefore live and spontaneous in itself. There was never more than 8 elements in a track because once the loops had found their way on to the sampler, they would all be sent to a mixer via separate outputs.

There was no sequencing of loops, elements were simply set to loop continuously ad infinitum. Following a short period of playing with the mixer, setting effects patches etc... recording would begin. Mixes were created by simply "riding the sliders" and tweaking effects along with playing any further live elements.







Philosophy

Ideas around the term "musiciam" have multiplied since it was first coined and if you'd like to read more about the philosophy relating to it... click here.




modified: 15/11/06