BEN RICHARDSON

Three for all

BEN RICHARDSON — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 18:35:29 GMT

The contradictory catchiness of Three
The music is equally adept at provoking headbangs, lighter flicks, or slightly arthritic hippie wiggles.

There are forty people in the audience at the Middle East Upstairs Wednesday night, and almost all of them still qualify as “kids.” There is but one real grown-up, and she is feeling it. She looks like my seventh-grade English teacher, broken down somewhere on the deserted highway between 40 and 50, but she moves with the energy of someone half her age, whirling like a yuppie dervish four feet from the stage. She is high, or drunk, or both, but also just crazy enough to be neither, and she’s dancing to the band Three like its 1969 and Hendrix just kicked off his set with “Fire.”

Three is from Woodstock, NY, so maybe the tap water prepared them for this kind of reaction. In the off chance it didn’t, they’ll get used to it fast ― Three play a kind of quirky, hyperkinetic rock that seems to suffuse the limbs, coupled with an enthusiasm that can’t fail to get said limbs moving, and fast. The six-count six-shooter riffs of singer and songwriter Joey Eppard combine with his soulful, soaring vocals to create prog-rock symphonies. The music is equally adept at provoking headbangs, lighter flicks, or slightly arthritic hippie wiggles.

I reached Eppard by phone last week, and he acknowledged the contradictory catchiness of his compositions: “We’ve always done things in an interesting way…it comes with challenges, but it can also make our music a surprise to people, and I think that works to our advantage.” He hastened to add, however, that Three’s genre-bending surprises are not written in for their own sake: “When you see us live, you see that it’s not just a hodgepodge, it’s who we are, we mean it, and it’s real. I think people can appreciate that.”

Three is signed to Metal Blade Records, a slightly odd pairing, considering the label is also the home of bands such as brutal goremongers Cannibal Corpse. Eppard is sanguine about the mis-match, casually explaining how Metal Blade CEO Brian Slagel had the band pegged for signing after hearing their CD, later popping the question as he helped Three pack up their gear after a ramshackle Long Island gig. This served as a personable and happy contrast to Three’s disastrous mid-nineties tenure at Universal, where the fledging band was dropped after a merger with PolyGram, for the sin of not having sold more than 150,000 records.

Church of the riff

BEN RICHARDSON — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:17:14 GMT

Pelican, Clouds, and Priestbird, Middle East Downstairs, July 23, 2007
Monday night at the Middle East Downstairs, and a crowd of about 200 gathered for worship.

Mic and the mechanics

BEN RICHARDSON — Wed, 30 May 2007 20:58:56 GMT

National Free Culture Conference has a wiki good time
At first blush, it was tempting to mock the 2007 National Free Culture Conference.

At first blush, it was tempting to mock the 2007 National Free Culture Conference, a group of about 50 dedicated activists, thinkers, and techies who gathered in a spacious lecture hall at the Harvard University Law School on Saturday, May 26. As they were about to discourse passionately on a variety of complex technical issues, no one seemed to know how to prepare the mics for the conference’s panelists. Eventually they hit on a solution: everyone on stage was asked to share a single wireless clip-on mic (the kind you see adorning the immaculate ensellures of crop-topped MTV presenters), which required each panelist to pass around the tiny device between finger and thumb as though it were some kind of rare insect. The irony was compounded by the availability of amplification to everyone else in the room, since each auditorium seat was equipped with its own built-in microphone.

The mic mix-up provided a surprisingly apt metaphor. Free Culture concerns itself with removing impediments to the exchange of media and ideas, and works actively to create new ways of sharing both. The onstage mic deficit and egalitarian distribution of mics among attendees created an atmosphere not unlike what might be called a “WikiLecture,” since the traditional hierarchy of author and audience was effectively exploded and everyone could chip in at high volume whenever so moved. Participants were encouraged in this activity by the presenters themselves; S.J. Klein of the One Laptop Per Child project enjoined the audience to “make the discussions confrontations — feel free to interrupt me.”

In practice, members of the Free Culture movement are involved in some commendable work. Klein, for example, works to provide children the world over with affordable computers, and co-panelist Steve Forester is attempting to compile a robust but infinitely editable online primary-school curriculum called WikiEducator, which he hopes can be used in places where more traditional closed curricula are unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Other presenters detailed similar projects, in which a wealth of information was to be painstakingly aggregated and then made available for free on the Web, ranging from the musical trove stored on the Web site of New Jersey’s groundbreaking free-culture radio station WFMU to the human-gene protein network that John Wilbanks of ScienceCommons hopes someday to make public domain.

Candyland

BEN RICHARDSON — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:15:39 GMT

The US Army wants you . . . to take on-screen violence seriously
“Hey! Do you like fake violence? Do you think you might like real violence even more? Good! Here’s a .50-caliber machine gun and some money for college.”

“Hey! Do you like fake violence? Do you think you might like real violence even more? Good! Here’s a .50-caliber machine gun and some money for college.” That’s essentially the message behind a new recruiting strategy launched last month by the US Army.

Since 2002, the Army has issued several versions of America’s Army, a military-warfare video game and recruiting tool (also available on cell phones!) that already has one of online gaming’s biggest fan bases. That, apparently, was not enticement enough. Three weeks ago, the Army upped the game’s recruitment value by sponsoring a channel on one of the world’s biggest multiplayer gaming Web sites, GlobalGamingLeague.com, to the tune of $2 million. That bought the army the rights to its own channel on the site, which offers players the opportunity to test their virtual mettle in everything from the martial CounterStrike to the marsupial absurdity of Wombat Combat.

The Army’s channel will be open for business in June. Registration will be free, as is the norm, but with a hitch: you have to agree to “additional contact from the Army.” Once signed up, gamers can compete in an array of “militainment” shooter games. Each month, the channel will hold a tournament, “Elite Forces,” allowing its most fleet-fingered fraggers to compete against one another in America’s Army. Tournament winners are promised lucrative prizes; the most-skilled players win the privilege of trying one of their cutting-edge combat simulators, which realistically mimic real-life combat situations.

The military gets a prize too, of course: unfettered marketing access to a vast legion of trigger-happy 17-to-24-year-olds.

To those who might look askance at such recruitment tactics, Army marketing director Gary Bishop insists that the new partnership is a harmless attempt “to tell the Army story.” “It’s not all about combat,” he says. “Being in the Army is about driving trucks, welding, nurses, and computers.”

Well, yes, it’s true that America’s Army features some Humvee driving, but absolutely no welding or nursing; it isn’t even possible to play as a “medic,” a staple of the warfare-gaming genre. What you do get is relentless, reflex-twitch slaughter, with the added bonus that multiplayer teams take turns as the mustachioed “Indigenous Forces,” each avatar lovingly skinned by a Naval Postgraduate School programmer in a crisp shade of “terrorist brown.”

Shadows Fall

BEN RICHARDSON — Tue, 01 May 2007 15:56:51 GMT

Threads of Life | Atlantic
Metal fans are a dogmatic bunch.