Dear musician, netlabelhead, netaudio enthusiast, creative mastermind, visual aesthete and free thinker…

From the 8th to the 11th of October 2009, we are again gathering the international netaudio community for a 4 day festival and conference in Berlin. The event will take place at Maria, a venue which is situated immediately on the former Berlin Death Strip – which once divided the city and the world into eastern and western hemispheres. These days have long past – but the 20th anniversary of the tear-down of the wall recalls pictures of helping hands reaching out to pull people from both sides up on the wall. We saw dancing people on top of the then useless scarf of concrete – and felt the beginning of a new historic chapter, visualized by the reunification of the two German states. In 2009 we will pick up the spirit of those days and invite many hands and minds from all over Europe – and beyond – to find out more about the needs and possibilities, challenges and chances of netaudio under the various cultural frameworks in East- and West-European countries.

As a first step you are kindly requested to fill in the Call for Entries-Form. You will be asked to give specific information about yourself, your project and your proposal. If you’re heading for involvement within the musical program we ask you to upload demo-sets (no netlabel releases!) to our soundcloud-dropbox. If you don’t know how to handle Soundcloud – don’t worry – it’s very simple! The sets must not be older than six months. Also we ask you for your possibilities to save some money by using personal connections (transport, accommodation etc.). It might also be helpful for a decision.

The call for entries ends at Sunday 31st of May 2009. We than take down the form and finalize the program with the help of your inputs. We will get in contact with you latest by the end of June. We are looking forward to a strong number of queries and hope we can invite you as a participant of Netaudio Festival Berlin 2009! See you all there!

Original Spanish version written by applejux

Fee: 10€ with drink
Duration: 00.00 – 07.00h.

Reserve your ticket

Netaudio Berlin announces that this years’ festival ist taking place at MARIA am Ostbahnhof (MAO). Located directly on the strip where the Berlin Wall once divided the eastern and western part of the city (and just around the corner you’ll find the largest still standing part of the wall), the site perfectly fits not only this years’ “Eats-meets-West”-topic. The venue will give the opportunity to the organizors to run three floors simultanously – which perfectly serves the ideas of a large variety of styles and a large quantity of involved artists. The different sub-areas will also serve as the place for the netaudio fair, arts and performance space and site for lectures and workshops during daytime.

The approximate date is from Thursday to Sunday – either the second or third weekend in October.  Maria is the venue where the Club Transmediale (CTM), Berlin’s highly recognized festival for electronic and experimental musical culture, is taking place annually.

J-Lab playing at netaudio night | CTM 2009 @ Maria

Hey folks, it’s again time to announce the next netaudio festival in Berlin. After 2007’s great rock’n’roll experience we’ve overhauled our engine, gathered the crowd and scoped out the next destinations! We’re still in the process of figuring out the most interesting highways and dirt roads of music, sounds and electronic arts that are produced, arranged, transmitted, distributed and/or discussed via the internet. The journey, this time, will not only take us to the vibrant intersections of the known territories and netlabel hotspots in the western hemisphere, but also to many fairly undiscovered spots and destinations in Eastern Europe. Within the vast and nearly white spots on the netaudio map we’re sure to find some inspiring audio-activists, netlabel enthusiasts, visual artists and music networkers to create exciting new sounds and explore future forms of co-operation.

We want our experiments in this years expedition will lead to a kiss, more than a clash, of ideas, styles and performances. So we’re trying to magnify the focus of music styles to cover a far wider range than in 2007. We would like to see POP & IDM artists on our three stages; there should be some heavy DUB & DUBSTEP involved; we’re looking forward to some freaky AMBIENT and LOUNGE tunes; we wish to see science fiction JAZZ and post-INDUSTRIAL projects and various other music traditions alongside our established ELECTRONIC section. Due to the fact that presently we’re not overlooking the details of the 2009 program at all, we might be as surprised as you are with what additional aspects we’re able to present. We’re doing it all with the kind and helpful support of Berlin’s  Hauptstadtkulturfond- without them we would hardly could think in this dimension…

Once again, we’re planning a free daytime program with lectures and workshops on various topics within the discussion of netaudio development. And as in the music program, there will be a focus on the east-west experience, know-how transfer, the exchange of ideas and methods of development.

At the moment, we’re aiming for a Thursday-to-Sunday expedition, adding an extra day to the program due to the variety of artistic expression we want to present. We are in contact with a very suitable and proper venue but have not finished discussions yet. This evening the netaudio.berlin crew will gather ‘to bang around with the starting gun’ or – to stay in the picture – give the crank of our expedition vehicle a few turns so that it brings us all the way to the 2009 festival! Why not have a think for yourself about the topic of interaction? And watch out for the forthcoming call for entries!

That’s all for the moment,
stay tuned

the netaudio.berlin festival crew

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netaudio.berlin – ideas for the future of music

The party is over – for this moment. The Netaudio Berlin and London crews introduced different aspects of netaudio to the audience of Club Transmediale. A day of experiments.

Afternoon: Andi Studer of Netaudio London and labelhead of After-Dinner Rec. is invited to take part in a discussion panel of this years’ daytime program of Club Transmediale [CTM] held in Bethaniens “Kunstraum Kreuzberg“. The panels’ headline writes: labels on the net – between gift-economy and enterprise. Thaddeus Herrmann of de:bug magazine who led through the sluggish queuing of different statements wasn’t quite in the topic. His questions’ reflecting more his assumption of the net economy than beeing anything developed out of the participants statements. His conclusion: Netlabels are on their way to change distribution from free to payed downloads. As most wellknown netlabel thinner won again the de:bug netlabel-ranking he at least had heard about their decisions. So he is not completely wrong. After Dinner though is actually not developing like tis. But this was nothing, Herrmann would know. Or ask. Like many other questions regarding the fast changing rules and chances of free resp. self determined aspects of the net-economy. Also Jan Gleichmar aka Disrupt of net- and vinyl-label Jahtari draws a different picture of his labels’ development. He’s looking at Jahtari’s net-, CD- and vinylreleases as a sophisticated label policy. He tries to explain that his free netaudio releases has taken him literally into the venues the world and opend doors of co-operation in artistic and other professional matters. Selling the vinyls is essential in the field of club-oriented dub music – where dubplates are the only ready-made item “allowed” to be used for riddims and vibez… In the meanwhile, his bookings are bringing in the money… Attention: Unexpected details are threaten to mash up the shallow surface of sleepy discussion! So Herrmann draw the attention back to keyword-dropping… Myspace: two minutes, five minutes on GEMA, three minutes on the culture flatrate… I went out for a smoothy. Seven minutes before time the disussion came to a well-deserved end.
Evening: It started with an abstract sonic art presented by Ollie Bown’s piece of generative computer music based on complex mathematical algorythms of a research project which tries to simulate organic behaviour. In form of virtual pets audio signals where born and visualized through red and white light circles on the screen. The interaction of the “pet-circles” again influences their development – and also the development of audio signals. Finally this process has impact on the birth of new pets… People are slowly dropping in. Everyone is in the state of orientation.

When the three sessions of Netaudio Ping Pong started within minutes a crowd gatherd around the table. In the best Web 2.0 ethos, members of the audience had the chance to cross the consumer / producer divide and perform themselves as part of the Netaudio Ping Pong sessions. Based on run-around table tennis, CTM visitors could lay their hands on some cutting edge technology and produce some wicked beats. As always, the game’s a very good catalyst for dragging down any surface of coolness of the visitors and is likely to create a communicative and relaxed atmosphere.
In between the ping pong games there has been some ultra bass tracks of the next generation web-savvy dubstep and underground UK dance producers, collated by netaudio activist Spatial of London’s Infrasonics.net. Afterwards self confessed sound nerd Norman Fairbanks of Berlin netlabel Pentagonik presented his latest sound tool – the Tenori-On – at his performance. Both appearances got the cameras of the various journalist clicking and handy movies where shot for other youtube addicts. In between all this a decent crowd has come to fill the venue.
Air’s got warm and people were in the best mood for the night’s highlight, the collaborative performance-session featuring unique cross-cultural associations by London’s live-laptop producer J-Lab and Berlin’s sampling artists Dr. Nojoke. Both have been accompanied by Visual Artist Servando – constructor of the Techno-Tambourine and various other selfmade controlling tools. While he was experimenting with his controllers to modulate sound and visuals, J-Lab was playing the bass guitar and send some heavy basslines through his setup, than changing again to Ableton live and back to keyboards. Dr. Nojoke instead was armed as usual with his suitcase full of sound tools – from his nearly legendary empty water bottle to children toys and 10-Euro-Ethno-Kitsch-Percussion-tools. The outcome was highly impressive. A massive session with a wide range of moods and sounds, deep and tricky, hypnotic and mindblowing. The sessions’ end came much too early and was drowned in the wild applause of the audience.
Finally Chris Box, member of the Netaudio London collective, had to explore the compatibility of his virtual record box in a back-to-back DJ set with Micamat, labelhead of Bologna based Homework Rec. – and one of the masterminds of Italian nettare-network. Netaudio Berlin in-house jock Cotumo had to be replaced shortly due to a fevery influenza. After some 30 minutes of wild beats between deep house and breakbeat-oriented mashup the evening at CTM faded away with a charming smile of Chris Box’s dubby techhouse solo.  At 03:30 in the morning the Tritamine VJ Collective asked the audience to “insert coin to continue” as their last intense and diversified visual statement of this long night.
Afterparty: Only half an hour after finishing CTM, J-Lab’s performing his second live gig of the night in the “Dienstagswelt” at RAW.tempel. He was followed by the second appearance of Chris Box – continuing where he stopped at CTM. Deep and housy, dubby and minimal sounds could be heard onto the first rays of wednesday morning. I went home some 30 minutes before the last bunch of partymonsters. So I missed the obligatory picture of the red-eyed crowd at the very end of this long netaudio day.
More Photos could be found at our flickr groups the next days…  I presume…
[And sorry for the missing links in this article...]