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March 03, 2005
Uncle Woody Sullender
The last time I saw Chicago musician and former WXYC dj Woody Sullender back in Chapel Hill, his politically charged post-hardcore band Service Anxiety was rockin' the basement of the old Mallette Street house, with each of the band members wearing matching work-shirts. That was in April of 2002.
Almost three years later, Sullender is returning to his old stomping grounds once again, this time with a banjo on his knee. Uncle Woody Sullender (his current stage moniker) plays at Nightlight tonight along with Spacelab and Cantwell Gomez & Jordan. Chris Toenes wrote a great preview for this week's Independent, and if you want an audio preview, you can download a few excerpts of Uncle Woody's banjo improvisations here.
I like the moments of frenetic picking and strange contact-mic drones but I'm especially partial to the pastoral finger-picking beauty of "Papa, Help Me Across" (2.13 MB), a song that got played on WXYC a lot last fall when Sullender's Nothing is Certain But Death CD was first released. (Which reminds me...although this really doesn't mean anything at all, I would like to point out the odd similarity between the title of Sullender's CD and the "nothing in life is promised except death" line that another Chicago musician used at the start of his incredible Grammy acceptance speech a few weeks ago.)
Back to podcasting for a bit - by intentionally linking to one of Uncle Woody's mp3s in this post, I have just podcasted someone else's content to anyone who happens to be subscribed to my main podcast feed. I'm not really sure how ethical or proper that is, but I like the idea of aggregating already publicly available mp3s for automatic download - pushing them instead of waiting for a pull. In this particular case, I know Woody wouldn't mind since (a) I'm promoting his show and his album, and (b) my very small podcast isn't going to put any serious dent on his bandwidth usage. But I probably shouldn't make a habit of this, especially if I'm adding to someone's bandwidth usage while removing their context. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know.
Posted by Tim at March 3, 2005 01:27 PM
Comments
dude, have you checked out audio activism?
Posted by: justin at March 3, 2005 05:48 PM
Definitely, I've even linked to Audio Activism on a couple of occasions, including this past Sunday when I linked to Brian's great podcasting "how-to".
Posted by: Tim at March 3, 2005 06:07 PM
Thanks for the shout ya'll. I think the network of podasters and podcatchers (folks sharing and folks downloading) could be a great way to promote artists in a distributed way. Imagine if like 10 - 1.000 podcasters downloaded and podcast one mp3 as a way to say "Check this out WE think it's cool!". What a big impact. I'm most certainly downloading what you've linked to Tim.
Posted by: Brian R. at March 3, 2005 07:23 PM