ten seconds a day

september 02, 2002.

Way back, in the year 2000, a small group of musicmakers got inspired by a wonderfully simple idea, apparently due to Karsten Schulze, from Cologne, Germany: record ten seconds of sound/music every day of the year.
They created a mailing list as a meeting point for discussion and progess reports, quite appropriately baptised My2K.
I wished I had been there at the time ... I sure would've liked to try my hands at such a y2K "diary in sound" ...
When following the simple rule to the letter, each participant would have ended up with a string of 366 sonic events, totalling to 61 minutes.

But will it be possible to keep this up?

The mailing list gives some insight into what happened.
It's an interesting read. Contrary to many other of these lists it also is a feasible read, as in all there's no more than some eighty messages, and most of them actually are from january 2000, when things just got started ...

And, yeah ... it hasn't been easy ...

Jeff McLeod, this month's Better More Star winner, from Montgomery, Alabama, eventually wrapped up his My2k with a CD: "Ye shall be cut into many pieces" can be ordered at his Sound and Chaos site.
[ added april 30, 2008: follow this link to visit Jeff's new web site ... ]

I - or rather: it was morrei my confrère and alter ego - (re)discovered the project through the site of Michael Peters, where one finds a clickable calendar list giving access to each of Michael's daily My2k-files. It's impressive in its near completeness. Only the final months show quite a number of gaps ... "nothing yet" ...[ added jan. 2004 :: Michael meanwhile has filled in all the gaps, and his 'My2k' is available as a limited edition CDR ]

David Cooper Orton early on decided to slightly bend the rules, and settled for one minute a week. His fifty-two one-minute weekly recordings came together on the CD My2K, a sonic diary for the year 2000.

Most of the other original participants 'dropped out' early on.

This month's edition of Better More Radio presents a series of six My2K-tracks by four of the original 'project-members'. A truly intriguing little collection, imho ...

But what about Karsten Schulze, who came up with the idea?

"Unfortunately," Michael Peters wrote in a message to the list (dated march 11, 2000), "he's not online. But I was really impressed. He has really taken time every day to actually compose tiny pieces, often with several tracks. The 60 tracks I heard were full of surprising ideas and really beautiful sounds."

For 2001 Karsten was "planning to do a series of 52 week minute-recordings, just like some of us have done it in 2000," Michael wrote on january 2, 2001.

Kind of makes one wonder what the guy is up to this year ...

[ Other one year projects: 365Days, OotB ; next related entry: my2k]

tags: my2k, sound diary, better more

# .6.

not available

september 01, 2002.

Last month's featured track, GrandTirage, appeared on the Cordial Satsuma Compilation 2002 CD, an mp3.com-CD with tracks by a dozen illustrious 'experimentalists' (like ArtBrut, Destructive Genius, The Syntax Cabal and Sieve Ochre, to name but a few) put together by Darshan Productions, from Drachten in the Netherlands, in order to (their own words) "promote experimental artists from all over the world".

It became available for on-line purchase first week of may.
And got deleted as of today...

I wrote Darshan's Yby an email to ask what had happened. She and her Lyra-partner had broken up, she told me, and she had decided to remove both the CD and all the Lyra material from mp3.com. "It feels like I have lost a good friend, and indeed that's how it is," Yby wrote.

On the other hand, we just got ourselves one more collector's item... now didn't we ... !?!
[Okay ... hands up all those of you that have a copy ... ]

A couple of the tracks - for the time being - survive together on the Cordial Satsuma Station.
And, well, allright, I'll keep up GrandTirage as my featured track for another month ... in memory of a thoughtful project.

Wish you well, Yby!

tags: compilation, sound chronicles, collector's item

# .5.