Notes from the forest #6

Boiler Room sold out

Last week I wondered who the audience for Boiler Room's Youth Report really was and three days later I found the answer: Boiler Room's parent company Dice sold the venture to European festivals organiser Superstruct Entertainment (Sonar in Spain and Mysteryland in the Netherlands, a.o.) who is owned by private quity giant KKR who is accused of environmental racism and currently being sued by the Department of Justice. It all felt different in 2019 though, when Sherelle dropped her ground-breaking footwork jungle set - good times.

Partisan Records Surge

I cross posted the Moving Shadow - Partisan - Over/Shadow timeline articles on Dogs On Acid, a UK based message board dedicated to jungle drum and bass music. The thread sparked a new interest in Partisan Records and unearthed two lost interviews with the label's founders, which are revealing to say the least. As the magazines in which they originally appeared have disappeared from the web for years, I'm currently considering republishing them here and making them available to the public again. In the meantime, check out this great Partisan tunes-only mix by Woz from 2017.

Rashad x Om Unit Interview in XLR8R

Since cross-pollination is kind of my thing I wanted to link to one of my favourite interviews from 2013: "DJ Rashad and Om Unit Compare Notes About Their New Albums and Discuss the Cross-Pollination of Footwork and Jungle". It's still so refreshing to read how they connect the genre dots in real time and are open to collaboration to push things forward. Now is the best time to read it and probably save it too, as the XLR8R mag has closed up shop in December last year and nobody seems to know if the articles remain online.

How to interweb in 2025?

The German ambassador to the US said two days ago that Trump is likely to hand big tech companies "co-governing power". For the record: Tim Cook (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Instagram), Sam Altman (OpenAI) - all pledged $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. I think it's a good time to think about how we like to communicate on the web, how we like to build our networks, and how we like to be independent of publicly traded mega-corporations. There is some good news about the alternative called Fediverse:

1. Mastodon announced that it is going to transfer ownership to a new non-profit organization.
2. Ghost (a non-profit organization) announced that ActivityPub, the technical standard on which Fediverse runs, will be coming to the blogging platform in 2025: "Suddenly, we could see a path to your personal website becoming the single source of your identity on the social web." They have confirmed that this will work on their hosted platform as well as on self-hosted Ghost blogs.

In my view the key difference to mainstream platforms is responsible ownership.

What I'm working on

In light of the good news from the Fediverse, I will be thinking more about the concept of a future Defrostatica website as an instance in the Fediverse and how to involve our artists in this.

🌱 The title of the weekly notes refers to Erik Kissane's dark forest metaphor for a resilient and non-gamified human network on the web.