Back with Mycelia

I went over to Imogen Heap's studio/home in the Essex countryside yesterday as part of a big event to get the news about the Mycelia concept out to a bunch of new people. The idea of Mycelia is to use blockchain technology to build a fairer music industry. It is different from others in that it is inclusive and artist-led. I facilitated a couple of the early "hackdays" that socialised the idea initially and got things a lot clearer. It's now ready for a wider audience and we have the concept of the artist's creative passport to hold the data about your works.

While digesting the progress and listening to a panel of industry folk talk about what's still up with music generally, I wrote this in my notebook:

"I'm in a tipi, in a field, in Essex. And I'm surrounded by people from the music and blockchain industries. We're in the in the grounds of Imogen Heap's studio, on the furthest edges of East London. Everyone here is somehow connected with the idea that Imogen has called Mycelia, an artist-led movement to make the music industry work for everybody. It's a spectacularly disruptive idea that Imogen presents in her disarming, English way with references to scratching her name in the family piano and finding a computer at boarding school that showed her how she could make music electronically on top of being able to sing, play cello, clarinet or piano. She's given us all "Creative Passports" which demonstrate the sort of data that she would like to publish and then services would pick up. As Vinay Gupta said in his talk it's a way to take an industry that's opaque and rough around the edges and turn it into something transparent and co-operative and then build even more upon it. That's the thing I'm getting most of all. It's not a static thing, it's a process. I'm looking forward to hearing more."

After that we had a tour of the house, the studio space and the living space, including a demonstration of some other artists using Imogen's well-known mi.mu gloves.

Then there was food, lots of food, garnished with edible flowers in little bowls and in between mouthfuls I exhorted Imogen to get a Steemit account and start writing here - wouldn't you love that??. And then we tramped round to the barn which was warmer than anywhere else we'd been and Imogen did a set with Frou Frou and then Tim Exile did some of his wild, human, improvised electronica.

Then it was onto the bus to take us back into London and a mad dash for the very last train so I finally made it to bed at 1.30am, I'm so rock'n'roll!