A story from real cyber life:
The other day I received a message from a Japanese musician via the internet portal and radio Last.fm. Just downloaded Todo el mundo en general from our album Via Stellae, he had put the song on what he called ‘power playing’ on his media player.
This social internet portal Last.fm gives you the possibility to register your listeners and I could actually follow the process and see that the piece was played on his computer no less than 119 times in a row. Incredible!
Next day our ensemble was presented with a gift from my Japanese friend with the mysterious sounding alias Duplex-Ache: a beautiful piece of electronic music inspired in the ‘power listening’ of Todo el mundo en general. The piece was of course named ‘Everybody’
You can listen to the piece on Last.fm, just click below:
Social internet portals like MySpace, Facebook and Last.fm are indeed time robbers. They do hold us in captivity in front of the screen. They sure prevents us from getting up and getting in contact with real life and real people. But who cares? If you can connect with people from the other side of the globe on a serious level, although these are people you’ll actually never meet, why bother about it? And, if a 400 hundred year old Spanish song can be the inspiration for a modern Japanese piece of electronic music, what more do we need? It might be a cliché, but music can connect through time and space, including cyberspace. This is clearly an example.
English
