4 thoughts on “Tell Your Friends and Family About the Ambient Soundbath Podcast”

1. 

   I just read ‘You are not a Gadget’ by Jaron. He confirms many things I’ve been noticing over the past 10 years or so. I’m still hanging on to some of the social sites, but I hold very little value in them. I’m definitely trying to encourage people to at least detach from it and/or be aware of the effect it has on people, especially those who grew up with this as a norm. Though, I’m still connected, I very much view it as an experiment. I’m also 44 and grew up before all of this came about, so I have always been skeptical in my approach, which makes me rational about how I interact online. I also work in a record store (I have on and off for over 20 years) and I play music both in a band scenario as well as solo experimental electronic etc. so I hold a lot of value in human interaction and word of mouth over these echo chambers of self delusion.
   Love your blog!
   Cheers from SF!

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     Thanks for responding. I definitely hear what you’re saying. I’m 42 and definitely remember the time before social media, though there have been many times that I was glad I was just posting on social media rather than flyering all around town. Honestly, though, I’m not sure that one might not have been more fruitful than the other. And frankly, that’s the problem. I deleted my Facebook accounts, but not before reviewing all of my stats. There was almost no traffic from Facebook to my sites and while there was some traffic within the Facebook ecosystem, between ‘Like’ bots and fake ‘Friends’ I’m not sure that I wasn’t just being trolled. I could determine that only about .03% of the traffic to any of my sites came from Facebook and of that an even smaller percentage purchased something or contacted me about something purposeful. Mostly, and this was probably the bigger issue, reading Facebook bummed me out. I love social media, particularly of the Listserv or BBS varietal, but those are old-fashioned now and seem to indicate my age more than the value they provide as social media tools. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with Facebook and when I read Jaron’s book it pushed me to truly explore its value and, I’ll be darned, he wasn’t far from the mark. Facebook, Twitter, etc… are remarkably without value compared to, as you point out, human interaction and word-of-mouth… Though, as a gigging and touring musician, myself, I am quite surprised that disparate, frequently isolated, fringe, musical experimenters and live music fans haven’t created some kind of ‘Book Your Own Fucking Life’ style website or listserv; it was bringing the artists, and really anybody, working on the periphery together that was one of the early web’s greatest accomplishments. Maybe there’s a Slack for that, or something and I’m just unaware of it. Good to hear from you. Also, my brother-in-law, Dave, did this write up: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/11/22/local-heavy-psych-explorers-celebrate-new-album/

2. 

   Hahaha! Thanks to Dave! I’m obviously in good company.
   Also, thanks for responding. This is one of the things about fb etc. that I rarely see, is someone taking the time to respond in some depth about something that isn’t political or some fodder for argument!
   I haven’t read that particular book from Jaron yet, but I did watch a talk he did about it. It helps that he’s a musician and speaks in musical terms sometimes.
   Yes, flyering around town was a pain but it got your name in people’s heads in a time when there wasn’t as much immediate information to compete with. True, it likely resulted in very few people actually attending but it was an artform unto itself, and the ephemerality of it was also part of the charm.
   I have to say that my initial experience with facebook in particular was a positive one, but I attribute that to how I used it. I had been in SF since 2003 and had established a foothold in the city, but socially I didn’t have much of a core circle of friends or acquaintances who were into what I was into. So when I eventually joined in 2010 I actively friended local musicians and scenesters that seemed in line with my interests. Remember the time when strangers actually friended one another and it wasn’t weird? I still have a handful of ‘friends’ and acquaintances that I met back in those early days. Posts were highly visible and i remember long fun threads of people just sharing videos of obscure music and really turning each other on to stuff, art too. on one of these threads I met and friended a local guy who turned out to have studio in the city. We got together and played a bit and listened to records etc. met up for some shows, he even let me audition a singer at his space. Anyway, one day he hits me up and says he’d been jamming on bass with a gal, but thought I might be a better fit on bass as he wasn’t as experienced or available to commit to it. So, I went and payed with her at his spot and that was the birth of the band Andalusia Rose which you can find all over my blog. We made a record and did a few short tours and played with some epic artists in about a 2 year run before Wendy got priced out of Oakland. Michael from Turn Me on Dead Man had seen me play and as soon as he heard she was moving to the desert, he hit me up to join that band which has since taken me to Europe and soon into the studio again! This is a bit long but it’s part of the reason I have such mixed emotions about the growing desire to ditch fb.
   It did at one point lend itself to social networking and that’s exactly what I used it for, with a moderate, yet quantifiable degree of success! That being said, during the period that I was developing these projects, I started to use it as a passive promotion tool, but that became corrupted when fb changed their algorithm to suppress those kinds of posts as well as killing the real time feed and selecting posts they wanted you to see. All while offering to boost your posts for money! The whole ‘pay to play’ thing all over again. Hahahaha! What a joke!
   So, I had a good experience while that was still possible, but these days it’s a highly corrupted network crawling with bots and frustrated trolls and sad, lonely people. The echo chamber of groups also feeds into the futility of it all…who wants to sit in a room full of people who agree with you, or in a room full of other broke musicians trying to sell their stuff to each other? The just end up trading anyway, nobody is getting rich, few are even paid at all.
   I remember Book Your own Fucking life well, I utilised that when I moved from Buffalo to LA in 96! I can’t say I know of anything quite like that online, though I feel like I remember them maybe trying to do something? I’m probably wrong, but I don’t think people are even that motivated to use a resource like that today. There is or was a house tour scene that must have some sort of network, not sure about that either.

3. 

   Yeah, a couple times here you hit an interesting and very important point: In the beginning before Facebook was looking to control the feeds you could actually get turned on to some cool stuff and actually do some social networking. That’s not the case anymore and that’s part of the problem. At first I thought it was something I had done, screwed up the algorithm with liking and disliking so many things, but slowly I came to realize that it was really part of the timeline design and a part of the design that was intended to maximize ads and promoted things and minimize peer-to-peer interactions, or to provide just enough to those not really paying attention for them to hardly notice what was going on. That’s how the whole election thing happened, I believe, because people didn’t really realize that they were getting a slice of reality made up shades based on their biases and preferences as recorded for use by Facebook. Add to that folks generating content, probably algorithmically, that tailored to these weird disparate views that made divisiveness make total sense and almost seem like a foregone conclusion. That’s a super bummer. There are people, I believe, who think that what Facebook is telling them is 100% true and when any part of any kind of media becomes a question mark then it becomes ‘fake news’ or ‘alternative facts’… To make matters worse, one of our most sacred institutions, the office of President and the White House is parroting these fringe perspectives and absolutely polarizing the American people. The propaganda tactics worked very well once in Germany, Italy and Russia and now they’re at work here. But all of that shit talk, mostly, just creates a visceral reaction, not an intellectual one and the bile, vitriol and emotional divisiveness just keeps on dividing us. Serious bummer.

   I do agree with the flyering, it got your name out…. Facebook was kind of the same deal. Maybe it got your name in front of a few people it might not have otherwise. Facebook could really be excellent, much like Mp3.com or IUMA could have been, but they just couldn’t make a go of it, one had too much of a cash investment and the other not enough… Either way both are gone. Silicon Valley, for a time, provided a hopeful optimism that tech could be used for good; the embodiment of the utopian tech future ala The Jetson, Star Trek or even Walt Disney’s vision. I was out there for a conference a couple years ago, and man, it’s so different out there now. I used to love the granola, yoga, and multicultural new agey-ness of SF, can’t lie, super appealing, but now it just feels like an icky alternative capitalism that pretends to be self-aware while doing an inventory of their status symbols… I still like the city, but the weird and provocative SF seems to be disappearing… Major bummer. I’m going to listen to your music now. Talk soon!