I’m happy to announce that Kind of Bloop is now officially on sale to everyone, $5 for high-quality digital downloads in MP3 or FLAC format. Buy it now with Amazon Payments.

Working with these guys was an absolute dream. Their creativity and dedication transcends the original concept, creating something that pays tribute to Miles’ seminal work while pushing the boundaries of the genre.

I know there are jazz purists out there that hate the idea of anyone interpreting a jazz masterpiece in this way, but to them, I’d only ask that you listen to it first before making a judgment. Virt responded to one naysayer in the comments on my original post:

Way I see it, chiptunes can either be a punishingly difficult artistic medium we happened to grow up with, or a tired retro fashion statement. Our goal was to stick to the former, pushing the limitations hard, building on our capacity for expression using the most basic sounds. There could be no better challenge, Andy thought, than one of the most expressive jazz albums of all time, one that has inspired us all.

So, you see, I’m not the least bit embarrassed by our work. In fact, I think you might be short-changing “the masters of jazz,” who I believe would be grinning ear to ear right now. They were ALL ABOUT mastering unusual techniques and expressing within a framework. That’s the whole point of Kind of Blue. The parallels to our own medium were dead obvious, and I got the same rush of perverse glee that the original ensemble must have felt 50 years ago, locking myself in a cell and playing between the metal bars.

I hope, if you still can’t enjoy the sound of the album itself, you might at least be less quick to dismiss it, given this perspective. It’s not a parade, it’s a love letter in our own weird handwriting.

So, thanks for listening. (Oh, and bonus points to anyone who can identify all the quotes and references in the album.)

Last year, to commemorate the release of Firefox 3.0, I posted a heavily-annotated copy of Code Rush — the commercially-unavailable documentary from 2000 about the open-sourcing of the Netscape code base and the beginning of the Mozilla project. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed Code Rush director David Winton about the film, who asked that I take the video offline while he decided what to do with it. Last week, he made a decision.

I’m happy to say that Code Rush is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license. Winton and his colleague John Koten set up a dedicated homepage for the film, with links to stream or download the film in various formats.

They’re encouraging everyone to use the documentary in new ways, remixing or reusing the footage for any non-commercial use. In particular, I’d imagine the Mozilla Foundation should be very happy that they can finally use this historic footage of their origins.

Thanks to the new license, I’m able to put my annotated version of the film back up on Viddler. I’ve embedded it below. Update: Replaced with YouTube version, since Viddler is dead.

Best of all, David Winton’s announced that they’re planning on digitizing the original interview footage and making them available. “We are still working to get our hands on a digital Beta deck to digitize the original dailies, but hope to get up and running in a couple months.” If you can help them out, get in touch.

Update (August 6): I just discovered that unreleased footage from the documentary is being added to Archive.org.

Some news: I’m proud to announce that I’ve taken the CTO role at Kickstarter, the Brooklyn-based crowdfunding startup I’ve mentioned here before. Yay!

I’ve been on the board for the last 10 months, helping find the development team and providing some guidance on tech, design, and community issues. And in the last year, watching the site evolve was an amazing experience, from an idea to a website with the potential to change the way things are made.

Since our launch ten weeks ago, over $250,000 has been pledged to make everything from books, magazines, albums (and album reissues), plays, films, art projects, zombie iPhone apps, and more. (Not to mention, my own Kind of Bloop album.) And keep in mind, the site’s still invite-only!

Getting people to give you money is tricky, but I think we’ve hit on a formula for success:

• All-or-nothing. Projects are only successful if they reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, otherwise nobody pays. This limits risk for both backers and project creators, who don’t have to worry about committing money and time to a failed project.
• Rewards. We strongly emphasize the importance of crafting good rewards, which makes Kickstarter more like commerce than altruism. We support multiple tiers of rewards from $1 to $10,000, limits for each, and tools for creators to contact each tier group independently.
• Publishing. A simple and powerful reward is access to exclusive updates during a project’s funding and development, creating a powerful connection between the audience and project. As a result, we offer publishing tools for public or private updates, including hosted media and update notifications.

These mechanisms and constraints allow Kickstarter to not just fund projects, but test ideas, engage with an audience, and pre-sell your work without risk.

Earlier this month, I spoke at the Guardian Activate Summit in London about the power of play and applying game mechanics to non-games — difficult problems like environmental change, political activism, and fundraising. Kickstarter turns fundraising into a social game, where people have to work together within a time limit to reach a common goal. Already, we’re seeing that projects develop their own viral momentum… Once a project hits 25% of its goal, success is almost guaranteed. (94% of projects that hit that mark eventually hit their goal.)

I look forward to pushing Kickstarter further in that direction, and build a platform flexible enough to do more than help artists raise money for themselves. I’d love to see more people use Kickstarter for commissioned works like Kind of Bloop, collecting the money to pay someone to make or do something you want to exist. Or anywhere you need to gauge market demand, like throwing parties without the risk of losing your shirt in ticket sales.

Soon, we’ll be opening the site up to anyone who wants to make a project — and that’s when things get really interesting. In the meantime, you can get an invite from an existing member, or sign up to get notified when Kickstarter opens to the public.

So I had this silly idea to isolate the backgrounds from famous Internet memes, removing all the subjects from every photo or video. I’m pretty happy with the results.

Like Jon Haddock’s porn sans people, these photos are banal out of context. Only someone familiar with the original memes would sense something’s amiss, like the set of a play waiting for the actors to stumble into history.

Can you name all 22 23? (Click any image for the answer.)

Continue reading “Meme Scenery” →

Update: Kind of Bloop is done!

Ever since Kickstarter launched, I’ve been trying to come up with a great project for it that plays to its strengths… I like to describe it as a site that lets other people pre-order your dreams — an easy way to get the people you know to fund your ideas into reality.

With that in mind, I just launched a project I’ve been dreaming about for years. The idea is Kind of Bloop, an 8-bit tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, one of my favorite albums of all-time. I’ve always wondered what chiptune jazz covers would sound like. What would the jazz masters sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga?

I’ve researched the topic quite a bit, and was only able to find four jazz covers ever released — ast0r’s version of Coltrane’s Giant Steps and Charlie Parker’s Confirmation, Sergeeo’s own Giant Steps cover, and Bun’s version of Coltrane’s My Favorite Things. (If you know more, please let me know!)

So I asked ast0r and sergeeo, along with three incredible chiptune artists (Virt, Shnabubula, and Disasterpeace), to collaborate on a track-by-track remake of the album. I’m raising the money to legally release the album, pay the royalties¹, print a very limited run of CDs for Kickstarter backers only, and pay the artists for their hard work on these very challenging songs.

Read more about the project, and back it if you want to make it real.²

Update: We hit our $2,000 goal in four hours, so this project’s definitely on! That doesn’t mean it’s over, though… Anyone can still give money for the download or limited-edition CD. But I’m not planning on selling the album after the August 1 deadline, so pledge now if you want a copy.

Footnotes

1. This is my first time licensing music, and I’m frustrated that there’s no free, legal way to release this album for free download when it’s done. By law, you’re legally required to pay royalties for every download, whether or not you charge for it. Wouldn’t a percentage of revenue make more sense?

2. Some people seem to misunderstand what Kickstarter’s for, expecting it to work like Kiva, where there’s a pool of investors waiting for neat projects to throw their money into. In reality, I’d expect very, very few projects to be backed by random people stumbling on it from the Kickstarter website. It hinges on your own social network, your ability to promote your project, and the demand for what you’re offering. So if your project fails, it’s most likely because there wasn’t enough interest from the people you know.