Created in Birmingham

• Area 15 December/January
  Hot off the presses
• Culture Vulture West Midlands’s Blog | Pecking at the culture carrion of the West Midlands
  Arts/culture blog for the West Mids
• Home of the Autumn Store Blog » Blog Archive » Autumn Store 5th Birthday All Dayer!
  “in January 2011 we’ll be FIVE YEARS OLD! And we’re planning an action packed all-dayer with BANDS, ZINES, DANCING, SUGARY FOOD STUFF, DINOSAURS, and hopefully COMMUNITY”. And check the comments for a Spotify playlist featuring (most of) the songs played at the very first night
• Call for Performing Artists Working in South Asian Arts at Sampad
  “Would you like to participate in a research project with sampad?” Well, would you?
• YouTube – Supersonic 2010 in 90seconds
  Contains less beards than you might expect. Plenty of black T-shirts though
• ***no awkward barz on the walk of stars*** | The Streets
  Warning: features Mike Skinner in the bath
• We Are Fierce» Blog Archive » Platinum 2
  “We are pleased to announce that we are looking for a new set of Platinum Artists for 2010 – 2011″
• Birmingham Printmakers
  “Set up in 1982, Birmingham Printmakers has a large well-lit workshop in Digbeth. It is available to all artists, specialist and non-specialist printmakers. We have 34 members and a voluntary committee of twelve, which runs the general day to day business.” They have a blog too – hadn’t spotted that before

Capsule started a ball rolling the other week, talking about how to engage regional audiences. There’s a good discussion in the comments that’s worth (re)visiting.

Dunc from The Autumn Store (and various indiepop bands, I’ve slightly lost track tbh) has followed this with “Why Don’t People Come To My Gigs”: Some thoughts on audience categorisation. Which is very good and kinda in the vein of the guides to promoting gigs he wrote a while back (have a root through his site).

Following a couple of links, I stumbled across Scene Not Heard which seems to have started at the beginning of this year:

Scene Not Heard aims to be a portal for artists and fans alike to the massive great plethora of musical happenings going on in Birmingham

There’s also a discussion thread about Birmingham’s music scene on Drowned in Sound, but I think they tend to come round fairly frequently.

Which all adds up to a community of music people in Birmingham all wanting to make stuff happen (standard caveats about ‘music’ tending to refer to indie/rock only in these kinds of discussions).

One more thing to highlight in all of this is a line from Dunc’s post in which he refers to the original discussion on Capsule’s blog, the significance of which I leave to you to discern:

it’s off the back of an event discussing the ‘music industry’ which always makes me feel like I shouldn’t be part of the conversation

Dunc from the Autumn Store has compiled a non-exhaustive list of 101 West Midlands bands. Non-exhaustive because he gave up at 101 and because he set himself two restrictions:

There were two criteria to this, firstly, they must have a myspace page and secondly, they must have spent most of their musical lives inside the West Midlands Bus Network

The result is slightly reminiscent of the Myspace Marathons BiNS’ did for Gigbeth and Dunc’s patience in pulling together that many links to MySpace pages has to be applauded.

Click here to see the list.

(There are a couple of voting days left so please vote CiB – http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-uk-blog/)

• Independent Of The Month – Style Birmingham
  Lora Leedham – Studio 6, The Merlin Centre of Contemporary Design, Hockley
• Isaac – a man of many talents who redefined the word legend
  Roger Shannon pays tribute to the late Isaac Hayes in an article most remarkable for the idea of a band consisting of Isaac Hayes, Huggy Bear and Taurean Blacque with Lovejoy as their manager. Oh, scrap that – I just got to the bit where Roger auctioned Hayes’ boxer shorts…
• Birmingham pubs Google Map
  Tom Scotney’s putting together a map of Birmingham pubs. Check it out and maybe give him a hand – it only takes a sec to add your local/fave
• Animation Forum WM research report
  “The Animation Forum West Midlands’ research report is now online for all to see. The report looks at the region’s ever-growing animation sector, and the role Animation Forum WM has played, and has to play in the process”
• Interview with Birmingham Opera Company’s Graham Vick
  Why does Birmingham Opera Company need 2,500 tonnes of mud to stage a Mozart opera? Its director tells all to (The Guardian’s) Erica Jeal
• Home of the Autumn Store Blog – How to Put Bands on and Not Lose Loads of Money
  “The next in my occasional series about how to put on a gig”
• Death Cassettes
  A new cassette (not record) label – “Limited to 100 copies.. On One of Four Coloured Cassettes, Hand made Artwork and Covers, And free digital downloads of the tracks tooooo for yr ipodz” (Spotted by Dunc at Autumn Store)
• Finally, if you’ve not had a chuckle at the council yet…
  They went and used a picture of Birmingham, Alabama’s skyline on a leaflet.  They seem to have used the first pic that came up when they searched ‘Birmingham skyline’ with Google – not that they were prepared to admit that at first, which is probably why every man and their blog has written about this now.  Ah well.

• Clusta: Pushing Forward
  Behance Magazine have some flattering things to say about Clusta.
• Capsule’s Sonar Showcase
  More news of Birmingham hitting the international scene – Capsule are taking Birmingham’s ZX Spectrum Orchestra and Pram to Barcelona for a showcase next Thursday.
• Antonio Roberts at B-VAC
  Antonio says thanks to everyone who went down to the first B-VAC exhibition and has copies of his work for those who couldn’t make it.
• Autumn Store – A Post about Blogs
  Dunc from the Autumn Store rounds up some blogs by local indie popsters and such, incl Colour, Bettyblog, Superbonusland and Ace Bushy Striptease
• What’s On In Brum? | The Blog – Bass Festival Launch Party
  Tom Horton was at the launch of the BASS Festival at the Woom Gallery and has put his photos up.