Episodes
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This week we're visited by Spoonuel (Sam Poon): an actor, singer, dancer, producer, and audio engineer. He's performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, at Carnegie Hall, other productions across the country, and feature film and television. Lately, however, Spoon has shifted his main focus from acting to music and is currently a student at the Berklee College of Music. Some of the key talking points of our conversation are exploring different styles through collaboration, the reason behind pseudonyms, the difference between art and content creation, and nepotism and mediocrity within mainstream media. Although Spoon is fairly young there's a lot to learn from him - I hope you enjoy the episode!
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Music has a wide range of scenes, and this doesn’t simply just a piece of music that plays on your cellphone. Brian Walker is one of the legends in the Philadelphia music scene. He has been a performer on “A Day Without Love” for over nine years and has been on tour for five years. He also established his podcast named “Podcast Dreams, not Memes.” He has also worked on a documentary called Safe x Sound. Today, Brian shares details from his music career and his tips when going on a tour.
All About Safe x Sound
[0:57]
Safe and Sound was supposed to play on Center City at the American Vocal Academy. However, this was postponed due to the COVID-19 situation. They’re now pitching it in on various festivals, and they are also planning on online screening and tv viewing.
[01:28]
In 2019, Brian was touring in the US when he thought about filming a documentary about culture and music and why it happens, how it occurs, how people connect. He interviewed some people and his wife as the director and camera person.
Brian’s Tour in the United States
[02:56]
Brian has currently played into 24 states, and by the end of July, it should reach up to 47.
[03:51]
Brian’s goal is to play music and map where his music was heard worldwide.
[04:08]
One of Brian’s favorite small towns is in Greenville, South Carolina. The reason was discussed in his documentary. Memphis and Chicago are tied in his favorites when it comes to cities.
Brian’s Podcast – Podcast Dreams Not Dreams
[05:13]
The podcast was made with a similar strategy. He used touring, but it was a different motivation. Its motivation is to create an audio library filled with different stories of people in their careers.
[06:39]
Brian is currently at a point wherein people’s publicists find him instead of him finding them. They were able to contact him through his website. Aside from that, some of the guests are also from referrals of the people.
Six Degrees of Separation Rule
[08:08]
Brian has always seen the six-degree separation rule. Just like in his life, he was able to experience it himself with various people he met throughout his life.
Brian’s Definition of Art
[9:37]
Brian has defined art as an extension or abstract idea of human experience. Because in art, you are showing raw emotions, and they are an extension of creating a reality. For a human experience to be art, it needs to have a meaning or get people to react to it in some way.
Relationship between Intent and Response
[11:02]
Brian believes that there’s a gap between the intent of the artist and the response it receives. Sometimes people perceive the music differently from what the artist originally wants to portray.
Artistic Trends in a Community
[15:57]
While he was touring, Brian noticed different music being played in various cities. For example, in Chicago, they sing about pizza, toxic masculinity, or and being gay. This is because Chicago is a queer-friendly city. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, they are more likelty to be singing about racial activism and inequality.
[17:37]
As Brian was born and raised in Philadelphia, he had noticed various changes when he was growing up. When he was 16, funk bands and hip-hop rock bands were cool. During college, they were cover bands, and bands were playing 90s songs a lot more.
[19:25]
Nowadays, people play music depending on what they want and how they want it. Brian thinks that this is a step in the right direction and a step towards creating a world where people can do what they want to do and be seen. Brian believes that this resulted from various social movements during the past years.
Brian on Collabs
[24:25]
The full-length album was Brian’s most collaborative project he had done. He believes that he could grow as a person and learn new skills due to these collaborations.
Tips on Touring
[25:42]
In touring, make your email brief. Create merch that you think people would patronize. You must do market testing and evaluate your goals. Moreover, write for projects and expression.
To learn more about Brian Walker, visit his website:https://www.adaywithoutlove.com/
You can also follow Brian on his socials:
Facebook |Instagram |Twitter
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Missing episodes?
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In this episode, we have Nastasha Guy. She is a Paris-based interdisciplinary artist working primarily with collage, photography, and film. Natasha moved from Philadelphia after working for in Philadelphia after working at Paradigm Gallery. Today, she will talk about how she loves art and she established herself as an artist in Paris. Tune in to learn more!
Mowing to Paris
[0:49]
It's been seven months since Natasha moved from Philadelphia to Paris to do her master's in art history at the Sorbonne. She is also an intern at a photography agency which she works in the archives and editorial department, writing texts for photographers and translating captions. Natasha moved to Paris because the government is really good about giving people like artists, specifically funding and money. It's been exciting to see where she may be moving out of Paris for a little bit to another part of France later in the year.
Networking and Community
[03:00]
Paris is a hub for art and fashion. Natasha feels lucky to meet people through friends of friends and then meet a variety of creatives. At first, she was late at meeting a lot of fashion people, which is very much not her thing, but it's interesting to learn about. French people are a lot nicer than they get credit for, most people give her slack if ever she's missing a vocab word, and some things are just better said in English or vice versa, better in French. It's been a learning experience for the French people and her that she has interacted with me and become her friends.
Life in Philadelphia
[06:14]
Natasha started working in paradigm gallery as a liberal teenager. She started part-time as an intern eventually worked there at post-grad as a gallery assistant, and was able to see the gallery's evolution, but also sort of like her evolution into adulthood. Jason and Sarah, the two co-owners, proposed Natasha organize and carry a show based around college because she saw her college work. And they were like; you might be good at figuring this out. And she was excited to work on organizing a show because obviously, it's generally a dream, but be about a medium that's so meaningful to her.
Commissions and Pricing
[10:55]
Natasha considers herself a little difficult to work with because she thinks she works intuitively. It's easy to like to make your visual arts a solitary thing, so she thinks working with people on commissions has been a fun way to do that. Natasha is still working on being open and willing to collaborate with people. A lot of the times people other people feel uncomfortable giving feedback. Right now, she is still learning how to approach pricing her work. For a while, she just offered to reimburse for supplies, which was like becoming the bare minimum. But the technical things that you would expect other people to pay you for - that's what you should get paid.
[15:18]
Many galleries don't have transparent pricing, there is something that's kept intentionally obtuse in the art market. It's sort of meant to be confusing and make people feel excluded.
Defining Art
[22:20]
For Natasha, art is instinctual. It works from instinct. It's like when you get into a state of flow when you're working.
Expectations
[29:01]
There will be a gap between your expectations and the reality of your skills when you start. And also when you are established and are simply trying something new. You're not going to master your art in just one day or just one year, and probably not in five years either. Focus on mastering the project at hand. Then focus on the next project at hand. Then keep doing that day after day until you are finally a master at your art. It's important not to discourage yourself when your ability doesn't match your vision.
Learn more about Natasha:
Website: https://www.natashaguy.com/
Email: [email protected]
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In this episode, we have Nick Papa. No one loves the Philly music scene more than him and his co-founder Leo Porth. The story of these two self-described “professional $15 concert-goers” began when they realized how many immensely talented Philly artists weren’t getting the recognition they deserved. This disconnect motivated the launch of Upandovr, a platform focused on providing in-depth free support for artists to help create, network, reach more fans, or figure out their next steps. Today, hi will talk about the music scene in Philly and what it means to be an artist. Tune in to learn more!
What is Upandovr?
[01:01]
Upandovr is essentially a creative support team for the DIY community in Philadelphia. The inception started a couple of weeks before the pandemic started when the founders discussed the amazing community wrapped around music in Philadelphia and how much opportunity lies in supporting that community with so much talent and so much to offer.
Newsletter
[02:57]
The Row-Z is the concert calendar newsletter for cheap shows around Philly. Leo and Nick manually aggregate all the information. One of the things they discussed early on was taking many different forms. They do a lot of research, and they have people reach out to them for events and shows. There are tons of resources to help and pull shows from other platforms.
Moving Forward
[04:41]
Coming from the marketing world, Nick sees how quickly things can be tainted when positioning your brand as support. One of the big things that Nick and Leo will do is do business with sponsorships events, especially live events. They need to have people help contribute to making that happen. Their roadmap is to have the support to scale to keep creating cool things and figure outputting things like events together.
Show Coverage
[09:45]
Coverage of shows is something that Nick and Leo are trying to invest some more time thinking about because it is an opportunity for them. It’s a medium where there’s an opportunity for reinvention and opportunity for show covers to be reinvented. It’s more of trying to start very ambitious with something because most of the time, you’ll end up halfway there.
Balancing Time and Creating Boundaries
[12:22]
Nick reminds himself to create boundaries by turning them on and off. He says that because when it’s your passion, you can work yourself past the point where you have diminishing returns where you work yourself so much because you’re so invested and interested in it. Nick believes to have “breaks” to be motivated and get out of bed in the morning feeling excited to talk to people.
Defining Art
[15:52]
For Nick and Leo, art is so many different things. But it’s the driving life force where they are putting back in. It is to put some energy back into something that they take from. Art is the creative inspiration, and it can be any medium. It can be in a painting, music, movie, etc. Art is crucial in both of their lives regarding what balances out their light and darkness.
What it means to consume art
[17:46]
Nick felt that he could not progress. But in some way, he knew he could be always better himself and learn in very tangible ways to evolve and move forward. He knows that he can always become a better person, especially when consuming something. Nick feels a total imbalance of him taken from a cultural zeitgeist. You just listen to put into making that, and it feels. And that has always felt weird to him where he is consuming art but not contributing something back.
[20:24]
Nick is always conscious of this balance of how much he is consuming and putting back in, and it’s important to him. And he is going to keep finding ways to tip the scale back to more output rather than more input.
Creative Resource
[21:37]
When you build something, you have to look at it as something around the creative community and as a creative resource. Anything wrapped around creativity, you have to leave room to adapt.
Upandovr:https://www.upandovr.com/
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Matias Van Order González joins us for the first episode of Abstract Essence. Matias recently received his BA in Electronic Music from Bard College. He is a Philadelphia-based music producer recording/mixing engineer, and film composer. He has done recording and mixing for music video sessions, as well as producing for many artists. Listen to learn more about Matias's career beginnings!
When did Matias start?
[01:12]
Matias was 16 years old and a member of his high school band. Matias was blown away when he saw his guitar teacher had a small recording studio set up. At the time, one of the things that drew Matias to the studio was his realization that you don't need to practice all that much to make things sound good, which was not entirely true.
An instrumentalist towards producing & mixing music
[2:08]
Matias has always enjoyed music. But when it came to playing instruments, he never felt particularly gifted, and he never felt he had a good ear for melody. However, he felt as if he had some analytical idea of how things fit together and should fit together, such as sound textures, and it seemed natural to him. It was a lot of fun and inspiring the first few times Matias did it, and it is still every time he does it now.
Cart Music
[2:52]
They do a series of YouTube Live session videos. Cart's concept is for a small group of people who are involved in everything they do to support each other in their music and the scene, particularly in Philadelphia. They had the most success with videos because everyone seems to want to make them. Matias has a lot of fun recording them, and people have told him that they help them book shows etc.
[5:01]
They started doing these at a barn in Vermont. One of Matias' friends, who's the keys and another guitarist in glitter spitter, has this great barn. Matias set up a little studio there out of necessity during the pandemic because they needed a place to meet up in person but without risking COVID.
How much do they charge?
[6:24]
They charged for them in Vermont to fund the studio's construction because that was all they were doing over the summer. They've been doing them in Philly at Matias' house, where most people involved in cart live and they decided to stop charging.
How does Matias define Art
[8:07]
Matias' definition of art is "an experience that you have." Art is not a physical object. People consider a song on the radio and a painting to be works of art. Matias believes they are not art unless experienced with an artistic mindset.
[9:19]
Creating art is an artist experience, and you perceive your own art while creating it.
[10:43]
Matias believes that all art creates an emotional, conceptual, or thought-provoking experience. It is art even when you are in nature or anywhere in your house, even without looking at a painting, just looking at the wall and thinking or with your eyes closed, imagining your own colors, sounds.
[12:38]
Anything you want to be art can be art if you think about it, listen to it, or see it artistically with an artistic mindset.
[16:28]
As a producer, you can figure out what you value about the song and how you want to grow it, and you can also allow that original concept to be as free-spirited and free-flowing as you want. But another job of the producer is to say no when you realize that there are other reasons why someone spends five hours on one little part. Maybe they're afraid of finally putting it out in the world and just want to delay it. A lot of times, it stems from insecurity.
What makes a certain session not feel like an artistic experience?
[19:56]
Matias says that if the artist is happy, he's happy, even if he's not happy. Matias views himself as a facilitator, even though there are some things that he gets artistically attached to.
[21:09]
Matias' strong feelings about how a particular band should be aren't always useful because it's more important how they feel they should be. People are more self-aware than we usually give them credit for. They know what they need to work on and what they're good at, but they may not know how to maximize their potential, which is why people like Matias come in.
Support and check out Matias’ work at https://mativg.com/.
You can also check his work on these sites:
Instagram | YouTube
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