anthropology of anthology/anthology of anthropology-Classwar Karaoke

Classwar Karaoke is a UK-based netlabel run by those musicians Anthony Donovan (aka murmurists), Adrian Beetjes, and Jaan Peterson. They issue quarterly--what they call--surveys. For each survey they collect tens of tracks licensed under a Creative Commons License. This time their 0017 Survey includes my least ambitious piece "Winter Sketch." Some names appearing in this compilation album are already familiar to me--I became to know murmurists via myspace (which I don't check these days) and am following Anthony Donovan, Chris Lynn, MaCu, Noise Research (who runs another netlabel Electronic Musik), and Wilhelm Matthies on SoundCloud. And Bob Ostertag is quite famous. I cannot help thinking about how times have changed. I'm old enough to know those times I had to rely on critics in order to know musicians across the world. I became to listen to those musicians such as Ostertag, Oval, Yoshihide Otomo, and so on because I read about them. Now we bypass the critics. I don't say critics are dead (I still read some of them), but they are certainly no longer gatekeepers.

Making an anthology is one thing, making an anthology listened is another. I think it's a good strategy that those operators of Classwar Karaoke do it collectively since you may not listen an anthology collected by one obscure person.

Read the short-bios of the musicians involved in Classwar Karaoke on http://classwarkaraoke.blogspot.com/2012/02/0017-survey-29th-february-2012.html