Postración

Blaine Transue is the host of Virtual Garage, a radio show where week after week he brings us some of the very best self produced music on the planet. You might wonder what does this mean, Blaine simply puts it this way "There are tens... if not hundreds of thousands of musicians around the globe who write, compose, record and produce their own music... at home... in the office... in the barn... in the Garage. Until now, this was simply music we would never have the opportunity to hear. But the world is changing folks... and thanks to recent advances in technology... and the internet, these “musicians” are converging and conjoining right here in KSVY's 'Virtual Garage'". And this is very true, on Virtual Garage I've had the chance to listen to songs by artist from all around the world, from Australia to my own shit-hole town Mexicali.



I'm very sure most of you have never heard about JHarley, Deputy Doofy, Hoo Doo Mule, Lilichi, Woodguy32, Billy Reid, Neal Bowen, Vibegeist, Hayley Deakin, Black Lily, Zallaz, AnangaRanga1, Kinkymomo, Rhonie, CygnusX1 or the obnoxious prick that goes by the name of midimacman, hell!, you've probably not even heard of the iComp Mafia. Well, these are some of the guys Blaine was talking about, I'm also very sure that if it weren't for Virtual Garage and the iCompositios community I probably wouldn't have an idea of who they are. Yes, these guys are virtually unknown, just as the rest of the artists on the show. Why is this?, well, because they aren't signed to major record labels or go on world tours, have music videos or their records out for sale (At least not yet!). Why or how did they get to be on the radio?, the answer to this, thanks to computers, web community's which promote music sharing, new music production software and people who like Blaine see something more than a hobby in all of this. "This phenomenon of self production and promotion is a musician’s and audiophile's dream. No longer do we have to wait for record companies, advertisers or "American Idol" to decide what we are going to hear. This is public music on public radio... musicians decide... people decide... hey... I decide."



On Virtual Garage Blaine does a great job filtering some of the best music by these artists and airs them twice a week, Friday @ 8 - 10 p.m. and Saturday @ 12 - 2 p.m. (PST), locally in Sonoma, California, on the radio station KSVY 91.3 and all around the world through KSVY's Internet radio stream at ksvy.org. A new feature added to the show is VG chat, where both the artists and the audience chat live during the shows.



Another place where you can find works by these musicians who're out there making, producing, publishing and promoting their own music is MUG Radio, the first online radio station dedicated to showcasing Macintosh users' original compositions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All of the music which is streamed on this radio station is contributed by Mac users to iCompositions, the premier venue for sharing GarageBand creations.




For those who might be scratching their heads and asking yourselves, what's GarageBand and what the hell is iCompositions. The answers, GarageBand is a musical creation application made by Apple for the Macintosh, you could say that it's an all in one virtual music studio complete with all kinds of musical instruments and effects you could need to make any kind of music you want. GarageBand is software for beginner musicians or people who simply have never even picked up a musical instrument but always had the urge to make music, because it makes the whole creation and production process very easy and it's very inexpensive compared with other more professional applications of the kind like Reason, Cubase, Logic and Digital Performer.



Now, iCompositions is a web community targeted at users of Apple's GarageBand application. They give every user unlimited free music upload space so they can share their creations, they hold frequent contests and every song features comments and ratings. iCompositions has users from Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the UK, Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden and Denmark in addition to the majority of their users from the US.



And as mentioned before MUG Radio for most of the day broadcast music submitted by users to iCompositions. By doing this MUG Radio provides an excellent way for users to hear a great deal of iCompositions and for the artists to get their songs out there. MUG Radios lineup includes aside the icompositions various shows like the Hey, It's That Guy's Show!, an odd Mac/music variety show hosted by That Guy, MUG Shots, where host jlgerk reveals the inner workings of some of the best iCompositions artists one at a time in this hour long show, other shows are Appletalk and As The Apple Turns - On The Radio, but they're currently off the air.






By now you must surely have come to notice that all of this represents at the very least a great alternative for al of you out there who are bored and feel sick and tired of listening to regular commercial radio stations on which they play nothing but the music that's imposed to them by the record labels which only care about getting their profits and the requests of a brainwashed audience that isn't able to see beyond the veil put over their eyes by the corporations, MTV and everything which represents the interests of the obsolete music industry.



The Internet is full of sources for people searching for musical alternatives and in most cases unlike the music you'll find at your local Wal-Mart it's completely free, thanks to web community's like iCompositions, Mac Jams, Buzz Play, Mac Idol, Beta Records, Media Feast, Sound click, among many others, but also thanks to Net.labels, like delete.tv's Spy Music, another great example of the kind of great alternatives you can find on the web. Spy Music or Música para espías, is a net label that specializes in narrative audio, the songs you'll find there sometimes are extremely experimental but they're always interesting because of their roots in the unclear concept of narrative audio.



But maybe the single most interesting fact about these things I've mentioned is that most of the people involved on these projects both on the transmitting end as well as the creative side of it, are doing all of this work for the pure joy of it. jlgerk, That Guy, Fran Ilich and everybody else behind these projects work very hard, sacrificing their time among many other things endlessly just to bring us this alternative, which has the power to make one feel as though another world is possible. Taking a particular look back to Blaine Transue, you'd be surprised to know that he's not only the host of Virtual Garage, he's the one out there scouting through an enormous amount of songs in various web sites and in all the genres wether he likes them or not, he contacts the artists, puts together the shows playlists, sends them out, goes through all the mail he receives from the same artists as well as rest of the audience, replying these at great speeds but without lacking his full attention and humorous comments, and he's also an active member of iCompositions. You might ask yourselves, why does he do all of that and probably more, I find that hard not to believe that it's because he truly believes in his very own phrase, recently upgraded to slogan, "If you don't like the music... go out and make some of your own".



And that's exactly what thousands if not millions of people around the world are doing at this very moment on their computers with their arsenal of virtual instruments in their garage, one by one giving pace to what's being called a revolution.



(I'm sure it ain't for the money...)