Darrell Burgan | May 17, 2008
Just a quick note to let folks know that May 31 will be the last regularly scheduled Blue Water Drift Dive for a while. I will be taking a leave of absence from the show, probably for at least several months. But never fear ...
Basically, I am doing this so I can focus more of my time on the mechanics of running StillStream at large, rather than on the tactical week-to-week details of running a single radio show. There are a lot of things that go into running a radio station, most of which the listening audience never sees (unless something goes wrong!). Put simply, I am overloaded with all this and have only 24 hours in the day like everybody else, so something had to give.
But don't worry, this is just a temporary time-off sort of thing, not a permanent change. In fact I've done this before with my radio show. Blue Water Drift Dive will return again at some point in the future, in one form or another, and will be even better than before.
My commitment to StillStream remains unwavering, and in fact this change will enable me to keep StillStream running better than ever. I will remain an active participant of the radio programs and chat rooms. I will likely even do 'raids' (i.e. unscheduled impromptu radio shows) from time to time, as the mood strikes and as time permits. And I certainly will be working to improve the infrastructure and keep StillStream operating like clockwork.
Also on the plus side, in the meantime we will be adding a new program to the StillStream lineup for Saturday nights, so the usual chatroom crowd will still have an excuse to congregate. :-) More details about that new program as they become available, but suffice it to say I think you will find the new show equally enjoyable to my own, if not more so.
Anyway so this is a positive thing, I think, both for me and for StillStream. Yeah it's one less weekly live show in the schedule, but our audience is now solidly established and so I don't think our listenership will be impacted. And I think a lot of good things will come out of this little vacation I'm taking.
So I will continue to be around, and I look forward to seeing you in the chat rooms during some of the other live programs here at StillStream!
Darrell Burgan | April 17, 2008
Just a quickie to welcome all our new listeners from the iTunes music service!
Last week, Apple added StillStream as one of the listed ambient net radio stations in the iTunes media player. Even though our listing is just one entry out of several dozen, the effect was immediately noticeable: our listenership has tripled overnight (or perhaps even more)!
Just wanted to welcome all these new listeners to our stream and encourage those folks to also check out our website at www.stillstream.com. ITunes is a great music player, but it can't show all the information that the StillStream home page shows. Stuff like upcoming special events, the weekly live show schedule, featured artists/releases/labels, and so forth - all of which is only available from the StillStream home page.
Anyway, we want to thank Apple for adding our station to the listing in the iTunes player and also thank all the new listeners for checking out our station. We hope many of you decide to become regular listeners!
Darrell Burgan | March 26, 2008
StillStream has always been about live music, but wow. Lately it seems like our special event schedule is full-to-overflowing with tremendous live events. Here's a sampling of what's coming up in the next two months alone:
March 29 - Jason Sloan live on BWDD
April 5 - Michael Peck live on BWDD
April 12 - mindSpiral almost-live on BWDD
April 19 - Mark Mahoney live on BWDD
May 10 - Jonathan Block live on BWDD
May 31 - Michael Sandler live on BWDD
In addition to these dates, I am talking to at least three other artists about dates in May and June, plus it is looking pretty likely that we will be covering the City Skies music festival live as well. I literally am running out of dates that I can host live concerts on!
Finally, I haven't even mentioned yet the live sets put on by each of the StillStream radio hosts. Every single one of our hosts performs live ambient music from time to time, and some of our hosts (myself and Allen for example) perform every single week on our shows, sometimes more than once.
I did a little rough math and came up with a surprising conclusion. Since the beginning of 2008 (a mere three months), StillStream has put on between 40 and 50 live sets of one kind or another, which is an average of slightly more than one live set every other day, or approximately four live sets per week. And that is just Q1 of 2008; our Q2 is shaping up to be even bigger than Q1.
Anyway, so rest assured your friends at StillStream are working hard to bring you the best in live ambient music. Nobody else in net radio is even doing live ambient at all, much less with such in-depth coverage. Tell your friends about StillStream - the more listeners we have, the better we are doing at living up to our mission: to promote the ambient music genre.
Darrell Burgan | March 1, 2008
... are greatly exaggerated. :-)
Sorry I haven't been updating this blog as often as I should, but it's not due to lack of effort. Rather, it's due to the incredible amount of stuff going on in StillStream land at the moment! Better to add new features and functionality than merely spend time talking about it in a blog, I always say. Well, okay, I don't always say that but it makes a nice excuse.
Anyway, so what's going on here at the ranch? Lots of things:
1. New programs! StillStream recently added NTNS Radio to our roster of live ambient programs, this time in a time slot that is more palatable to our listeners outside of the Americas. Mark Stolk, the host of NTNS Radio, puts on a magnificent program that plumbs the depths of ambient noise and ambient experimentalism. Great music and great times, which we encourage you to check out!
2. If you haven't noticed, the StillStream special events calendar is really filling up. We've always been very fortunate to have a great set of ambient artists who want to perform live here, and 2008 is shaping up to be the best year yet, with live concerts from Mark Mahoney, Michael Peck, Jason Sloan, Michael Sandler, Altus, mindSpiral, Tony Gerber and Spacecraft, and so many others. Lots of activity in the special events department!
3. Plus of course we have the live performances by your StillStream hosts, who have been burning it up lately. Case in point, Tange has been playing some of the most evocative live ambient I've heard in awhile, but not only is he performing often but his concerts go on for HOURS. Someone get the extinguisher, he's on fire! Plus we also have tremendous live performances by Stephen Philips, Allen Goodman, and myself that go on every week. So much live music being performed we can't keep the archives up to date!
4. We have run out of disk space! Seems odd for me to be excited about this, I know, but there's a good reason: it means that we finally have built our repository back up to its original size; the size before the whole net radio industry got turned upside down in the halls of DC, forcing us to rebuild our library for the third time in several months. And the great news is that not only do we have more tracks than disk space, but we now have WAY MORE tracks than disk space! So we have been working on technology solutions that will enable us to continue to grow our repository without costly enhancements to our infrastructure. Once these solutions are in place, StillStream will be well positioned to continue to grow our repository indefinitely, with no effective upper limit to how much music we can present. Stay tuned for more on this front.
5. One of the concerns I had when StillStream finally switched to our current licensing model was whether there was enough quality music out there that matched our format that was also legal for StillStream to play. Not that there isn't an incredible volume of high quality, free, independent music out there available under Creative Commons (CC). But a lot of the CC ambient material is mislabeled, in my opinion. The bulk of it is noise or glitch with only slight ambient overtones, not really a match for our format at all. Some of it, in fact, doesn't even have ambient overtones (which frustrates me to no end - don't call it ambient if it isn't!). Anyway the good news is that once one clears away the mislabeled non-ambient stuff, clearly there are still many metric tons of great ambient music out there. We literally have not even scratched the surface! And the rate of release of new ambient CC music seems to be accelerating exponentially, which consumes an awful lot of our time just trying to keep up with the flood. Of course, this is a good problem to have. :-) What a great time to be a lover of ambient music!
6. We've also been working on numerous enhancements to the
StillStream web site, including our automatic playlist generator and some other enhancements that we are still fleshing out.
So anyway, I think it is easy to see that there is a huge amount of activity going on at StillStream. Please don't interpret a sparsity of blog posts to mean that we're not busy ever-improving the quality of our service. We are. The StillStream ambient elves are always at work scouring the net for the best new music and the StillStream backoffice ogres are always improving our technology infrastructure. StillStream's best is still yet to come! Keep it tuned here my friends .....
P.S. We also added a nice little page that talks about ways people can support StillStream if they are interested. Have a look at:
http://www.stillstream.com/contributing.php
Even if all you can do is post a link to StillStream, don't think that isn't important - it is! And if you are a contributor to StillStream: thank you so much for your help!
Darrell Burgan | January 2, 2008
Just a quick note to let folks know I've decided to take some time off from the Sunday Night Chill, simply because I have too much going on to sustain two weekly radio broadcasts. I will still try to hop on the air whenever I have unscheduled time but for now I'd like to keep such additional broadcasts on an ad-hoc basis.
I will resume Sunday nights again sometime later on after I've caught back up again.
Cheers!
Darrell Burgan | December 19, 2007
I'm sure folks have noticed that we have rolled out a brand new look and feel for the StillStream.com web site! Check it out:
http://stillstream.com
This new framework will serve as the platform for us to build a whole bunch of new functionality. Here are some of the things we're considering adding:
1. Searchable playlist history. Right now you can only see the most recent tracks that have been played, and when they fall off the page they're gone for good. In the future we'd like to keep track of every single play and keep the data around forever - and then give artists the ability to search for themselves so they can see how often they've been played over time.
2. Show- and Host-specific web pages. Right now we have some offsite websites for a couple of our shows (Kite Radio and Ambitar) but it sure seems like the StillStream site itself ought to mention some of these programs too! We plan to add a whole bunch of new functionality surrounding the shows, the people who host the shows, and what songs are played on each show.
3. Artist, album, and label features. You've probably noticed the new album and artist features on the home page, but we plan to add even more functionality surrounding this, including the ability to see past features.
4. The blog system itself needs an upgrade, and we plan to add a bunch of new features including show-specific blogs for each host and many other things.
5. Current stats enhancements. If you notice the top of each page we show what is currently playing, how many listeners there are, etc. But there are some blanks still to be filled in, such as showing what tracks are coming up (sorry, no time travel, so this will only work when Wally is playing, not during live shows). We also plan to fill in the "Recently New" section, which leads us to ...
6. Better album release tracking. Right now we know what album each song belongs to, and what URL the album can be found at, but we don't keep track of when the album was added to our library, nor do we keep track of album covers.
7. Whatever else we can think of.
Rest assured we are dedicated to keeping StillStream at the forefront of net radio stations when it comes to site functionality and quality.
We hope you like our new look and feel! As always, please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions at:
http://stillstream.com/contact.php
Cheers!
Darrell
Darrell Burgan | December 10, 2007
The other night in the StillStream chatroom, I realized something about StillStream: we really are a totally unique net radio station, unlike any other (i.e. our marketing BS might actually be true)!
Folks may have noticed that over the past several weeks StillStream has broadcast a large number of concerts and other live performances on our various radio programs. For example, here is a rundown of the activities just in the past week:
Dec 8: Tony Gerber and Darrell Burgan live concert during Blue Water Drift Dive
Dec 7: Allen Goodman live improvisation during Ambitar
Dec 6: Allen Goodman live improvisation during a raid
Dec 4: Two Stephen Philips live improvisations during Kite Radio
So, that's a total of five live performances in the past seven calendar days. Not bad at all. What's more is nearly every week has been like this for the past several weeks, and at a reduced rate since StillStream began more than three years ago.
What some folks may not realize is that live performances and live shows are really what makes StillStream different from the other net radio stations out there. Sure there exist some excellent ambient net radio stations like SomaFM's Drone Zone, Lounging Sound, M.O.P.S., and many others. But none of these stations offers live scheduled radio programs, much less a focus on live music performances.
In addition to the live performances and shows, we are also the only major ambient net radio station to offer a live chatroom concurrently with our live broadcasts. This is to facilitate the building of a community of ambient artists and fans, to allow fans to interact with artists, and most importantly to give artists an actual real audience for live net performances. I really think this is the key innovation that makes StillStream special, despite its simplicity. The only thing that doesn't really make sense to me is why no other stations do anything like this?
I have to believe that eventually the other major stations will begin to offer more live programming in StillStream's vein. For example, it would be very cool if SomaFM were to add live ambient programs and performances to its Drone Zone station. But until then, StillStream will continue to blaze the trail forward for the ambient community.
Thanks for listening!
Darrell Burgan | October 20, 2007
Sadly, this is the last Different Skies 2007 post. The week has flown by, to the point that it seems like I just got here. I'm very stoked about tonight's program. It ought to be stone groove!
Speaking of which, please note that tonight's Blue Water Drift Dive has been preempted by the Different Skies 2007 live show. To that end, the show will actually be starting about 30 minutes earlier than usual. It also will end when the live show ends, since I have to literally break down my stage rig and pack it into my car before I sleep tonite.
It will be very sad to leave this beautiful place, but it will be very nice to be with my family again too. I'm looking forward to Different Skies 2008 and hopefully we can build upon some of what we've been doing this year.
w007!
Darrell Burgan | October 19, 2007
Wow what a week. It's literally FLYING by. I blinked my eyes and all of a sudden it's dress rehearsal day!
Fortunately the pieces have really come together. I think it's safe to say this year's Different Skies has elevated the musicianship of the show to a new level. I'm very proud to be a part of this ensemble cast.
Last night's jam was the shizzlus maximus. It was so much fun and had so few legitimate gaffes that Mike Metlay asked me if Earth Mantra would be interested in releasing a recording of the jam (the answer was, of course, YES). So keep an eye out for that release, which will be available freely under Creative Commons like all the other music on Earth Mantra.
Okay well that's enough for one day. My body is sore, my brain is tired, but I'm fully saturated with music. A good place to be indeed.
Darrell Burgan | October 18, 2007
Wow yesterday was a blast. We finally got some real music going as well as a real live all-star jam that was really fun. The piece I brought to the week is starting to gel into something really cool. The music overall is really coming together!
Afterward the live jam we watched a really cheezeball sci-fi movie called Nightfall, which happened to be filmed at Arcosanti. My gawd what a terrible movie. The fun part was that we turned the volume down (or more accurately, the video tape didn't have any audio), and so we supplied the dialogue ourselves. Needless to say the movie was much better this way.
By the way, check out Joe's blog, which has some great coverage of DS07 as well:
http://www.ibiblio.org/emusic-l
Just about time for lunch, so I'm headed out. Keep it tuned to StillStream!
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