Virtual Sound & Vision festival - the story

Hello again. I wanted to tell you more about this weekend's Virtual Sound & Vision festival that I'm pleased to be part of and very excited about, as when you think about it, 14 musicians performing live back-to-back sets from thousands of miles apart, sounding like we are in the same room and stage, it's just amazing.

Live via the Internet Saturday afternoon (Oct. 3rd) at 17:00 UTC, this ground breaking event is the brainchild of the aforementioned in last night's email, Rainer Straschill (Germany). Having produced several live Internet based audio performances over the last few years and seeing the interest in live video performance, Straschill approached several of us in the web based music community Loopers-Delight who had begun doing live video webcasts over the last few months, with the idea of banding together and creating a 'virtual' live music festival.

As interest grew this past summer 'the event', it's time frame, participants and philosophy of performance content came together to be live improvised multi-location musical performances and video art, the first of it's kind and dubbed Virtual Sound & Vision festival.

One of the principle feelings about the video content of Virtual Sound & Vision was that it's acts become more than 'musicians performing in front of a webcam' which frankly many of us myself included were initially doing as we experimented with this new platform over the last few months. During the festival's planning several of us began exploring new technologies to add video content to the shows and during which time video artist/filmmaker Emile Tobenfeld stepped forward to produce an official festival video piece, making it available for those desiring to include his film as some or all of the 'picture' portion of their broadcast.

For my part in Saturday's amazing event I've put together a trio performance and the opening set of Virtual Sound & Vision. Starting at 1700 UTC/1pm EST (note - I erred in my previous email re the EST conversion time), joining me will be electronic drummer Ray Istorico (USA) and saxophonist/fretless guitarist/'folk' instruments Peter Thorn (Sweden).

For the Goodin/Istorico/Thorn performance visual content we are expanding on festival directive to make our video portion more like a 25 minute film complete with video work I am producing specific for this show, a portion of Tobenfeld's wonderful video and a series of additionally wonderful still images from bandmate Thorn's native Sweden. And to this visual score we'll be performing live improvised created on the spot music all together from 6000 miles apart, with Istorico in Florida, myself here in NY and Thorn in Sweden, all made possible by high speed Internet connectivity and wonderful software.

We'll be followed by VSV creator Straschill live from Germany at 17:30 UTC, from the UK, David Cooper Orton at 18:00, Steve Moyes & Agnes Hay at 18:30 also from England, Jeff Duke another Floridian (USA) at 19:00, from Spain the Flying Dream at 19:30, Jean-Paul De Roover from Canada at 20:00, across the Atlantic once more to Italy with Fabio Anile and Xavier Plagaro Mussard at 20:30, and over to England again for the two festival concluding sets of Matt Stevens at 21:00, the first among us who realized the potential of live webcasting, and doing the closing set Stephen Goodman at 21:30.

What a day, what a world, all connected live through the wire and to your computer screens, just as magical as the now common television was 40 years ago. Don't miss this amazing event fusing technology and performance art. To 'attend' Virtual Sound & Vision direct your Internet browser on Saturday to vsv.kybermusik.net.

Please note as the bulk of you in my email audience are in the States, for time conversion 17:00 UTC Goodin/Istorico/Thorn set is at 1pm EST and all the above mentioned sets continue every half hour thereafter running to conclusion at 22:00 UTC, 6pm EST. A time zone calculator is available by the way at http://www.timeanddate.com/Worldclock.

Have a great weekend and we hope to have you logon to vsv.kybermusik.net on Saturday and attend Virtual Sound & Vision.

Jim

Additionally this weekend is my family's participation in the annual Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation 'Walk for the Cure' on Sunday, Oct. 4th. We'll be doing a 10K walk raising awareness of diabetes and support for diabetes research. In this fall's campaign our family has raised just under $4,000 for JDRF. If you might like to donate in support of this event go to Callie's Crusade for the Cure. Thank you.