I’ve just finished uploading and captioning on Flickr the few photos I took while in Hong Kong.

For some reason I felt really self-conscious about taking photos on the trip, so most of them are taken on the one “tourist” day I did, when I went to Lantau Island to see the cable car, Big Buddha, Po Lin temple and the Tai O fishing village.

Thankfully some other folks have taken some great shots of the other interesting things I saw, like Man Mo temple, the Peak, Tsim Sha Tsui at night and the experience of catching the MTR rail service.

I’m still waiting for Google Street View to launch in Hong Kong to see if they snapped me as the Google car rolled past. Might be the most fortuitous holiday snap of them all…

Over at the Zumio blog I’ve posted about a recent career shift to start at Inspire Digital. Over the jump is a bit more on how I came to the decision, what it means for Arketype and where I see things heading…

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So in my recent busy-ness, I’ve neglected to post on what’s been happening in Fuzu land…

First single

We recently ran a competition asking folks to choose our first single from our new EP The Point – which they thankfully did

We’re kicking off with Fire Exit, which you can check out on
MySpace or download from the Fuzu website (does anyone know where the download link went from MySpace’s player? We’ve enabled downloading, but can’t seem to see the download option in the player anymore…)

Launch gig

We’re booked in to launch the EP at the Supper Club on 9 July.
The Rapids and Sean Carey, who also engineered the EP, will be joining us for the night.

We’re looking forward to officially launching the EP and showing off the limited edition packaging; each is hand screenprinted and numbered, and featuring fab artwork from We Buy Your Kids.

We’ll also be playing the tracks off the EP and debuting some new material. Should be a fun night

iTunes

The Point is now available on iTunes – which is always a buzz. We’d be stoked if you could leave a review as well. (And just a note that you can also get our previous EP Between The Lines there too…)

Excellent TED talk I got to watch over the weekend on the “loss of wisdom” in society that, in part, led to the collapse of the economic system.

He begins by focusing on Barack Obama’s appeal to our sense of virtue, rather than material things nor our call to rely on and trust the state. A great talk – well worth the time to watch…

Over the past two weeks we’ve all been reeling from the news coming out of Victoria, of the devastation wrought by the bushfires.

Although I’ve been silent here (and on my personal blog) this has been primarily because I simply don’t know what to say. That said, there are times for words and times for prayers – an event like this is a time for prayer in my opinion…

Needless to say my thoughts and heart join all those at the memorial gatherings today in sending my best wishes to all those touched by this tragedy.

Part of the Jager Uprising series. 5 bands across 2 stages with great Sydney acts The Grand Lethals, City Calm Down, Beggars of White Noise, The Kandy Apples.

Bands start at 8:00pm and we’re on at 9:30pm sharp.

In a previous post I outlined the costs of recording an independent EP, and hinted that with Fuzu’s second EP we were trying to significantly reduce our costs.

Some friends who read the post found it useful, and I’ve also participated in some further discussions on a related post over at new music strategies.

As we’ve just completed mixing and mastering (i.e. we’re close to finished the project) I thought it might be worthwhile looking at the costs so far…

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Just a quick note to say that I’ll be joining a host of great musos this Thursday and Friday night at the Hopetoun Hotel, Surry Hills, to perform songs from Big Star for the nonzero records/FBi radio fundraiser show.

If you’re on Facebook, you can get more details on the event page.

On the Thursday night Fuzu (my band) is also playing a 40 minute set kicking off around 9:15pm. But if you can’t make that, we’re also playing a headline show the following Wednesday at the Hopetoun (Facebookers: details here).

Given how quiet I’ve been around these parts of late, I thought I might post a quick “what’s been happening” post.

• Fuzu have finished recording and mixing our second EP – tentatively titled “The Point”. We’ll be mastering later this month, and hopefully completing the artwork shortly after. I’ll hopefully have a follow-up to my budget post soon reflecting the actual budget.
• I’ve been working solidly on two big projects (one for Inspire Foundation, another for UNSW. This has taken up a big chunk of my time (as one might expect) – but I hope to be a little less frantic come February.
• Thanks mostly to Timo Rissanen, further work has been done on refining the pattern’s for Arketype’s first range, which will be launched for Winter 2010 now, instead of Summer 09/10 (I’ve been a bit too busy with the ‘day job’ and have missed some deadlines). We Buy Your Kids are working on the graphic designs for the range – I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with given the logo treatment Sonny and Biddy, the duo behind WBYK, came up with (more on that front soon).
• Holidays – I’ve taken 3 weeks off work to visit family in Queensland – which was a wonderful break (that’s not quite over yet…).

Recent reading

I’ve also been doing a lot of reading of more “popular science” accounts of network theory, prompted in part by an ABC doco on the topic, and also economics and the history of money. This was in part prompted when a friend of mine sent me this video on money.

After reading Peter Bernstein’s A Primer on Money, Banking, and Gold it seems that many of the claims in the video are reasonably accurate.

I also recently finished Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody which looks at some of the societal changes being spurred on by networks. Especially interesting to me is the notion of “reduced transaction cost” for organising collective action.

George Soros’ The New Paradigm for Financial Markets was also an interesting read, albeit a bit repetitive. What’s most interesting is that an über-capitalist such as Soros would have such disdain for the models and assumptions underpinning the industry that he profited so well from.

Critical Mass by Philip Ball is a great overview of what he describes as an emerging “physics of society”. The book covers network and game theory, and emphasises the extent to which power laws and “phase transitions” apply to social phenomena. It also weaves into its narrative the ideas of many economic and social thinkers in history – which was fascinating to me as someone who’s not overly familiar with many of their contributions (at least not directly/explicitly).

Continuing the theme I’m currently reading Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. It delves much deeper into “small world” networks (popularised by the “Kevin Bacon” game) which are covered more lightly in Critical Mass.

I have often seen a lot of debate about the merits of downloading music for promotion of a band and how downloads are changing the music landscape.

Generally I agree that the opportunities for bands are much greater in this day an age than they were previously. In fact, our first EP is released under a Creative Commons license because of this belief – anyone can share our music with their friends, remix it (as our friend Karoshi just has – can’t wait to share that with you!), and the like.

What I haven’t seen is a lot of discussion of how much it actually costs to record and produce music of a standard suitable for “releasing” (radio play etc.). I get a sense that there’s a bit of a misconception that, with the advent of cheaper computers and audio recording hardware and software, that artists are able to produce their music really cheaply, which isn’t actually the case.

The other suggestion I see a lot is that bands can release music for free and make money through other means (performance fees etc.). This I think is in some way related to the first misconception, but also is problematic in its own way.

What I want to do in this post is share my experience of producing music with my band, Fuzu, and having a look at what it costs to release an independent EP.

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