Andre Fischer Joins IPR

Posted by admin on Saturday, November 29th, 2008

We are very pleased to welcome Mr. Andre Fischer to IPR in the role of Director of Music Industries.  In this role, Andre will be responsible for cultivating strategic partnerships and promoting outreach efforts to develop statewide, national and international opportunities for marketing and public relations.  Working with parties from non-profit and for-profit sectors, government and other educational organizations, he will cultivate fundraising, underwriting and business partnership opportunities, with the public and private sectors, in support of the Institute’s vision, mission and agenda.  He will collaborate and actively engage with administration to assist in recruitment, alumni and outreach relations, fund-raising, marketing and business partnerships, and the generation of internships and job opportunities for students and graduates.  Additionally, Andre’s experience as a music industry professional will be called into the academic setting, where he will act as an instructor of guest lectures, seminars and potentially his own classes in the near future.

Please join us in welcoming Andre into our community.  Following is a short list of Andre’s qualifications and accomplishments.

Professional Experience: Senior Vice President, MCA/Universal Urban Music Dept; Vice President Jazz A&R for Quincy Jones, Qwest/Warner Bros.; and Vice President of Publishing Development, 20th Century Fox Records & Films. André Fischer is responsible for producing, executive producing, performing, and recording with many of the music industry’s most gifted pop, R&B, rock, and jazz performers: Rufus featuring Chaka Khan (founding member and producer), Patti Labelle, Michael Franks, Natalie Cole, Tony Bennett’s Perfectly Frank (which won a 1993 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal), James Ingram, B.B. King, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Pointer Sisters, Diane Schuur, Temptations, Dusty Springfield, Brenda Russell, OC Smith, Dr. John, Laura Nyro, Lou Rawls, Jackie DeShannon, Nancy Wilson, Milt Jackson, Bruce Hornsby, Oscar Brown, Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions, Jerry Butler, The Rolling Stones tour, Elton John tour, The Who Tour, Etta James, Neil Diamond, Anita Baker, Janet Jackson, Vesta Williams, Leroy Hudson, Betty Wright, Phil Perry, Steve Khan, Tower of Power, Vanessa Ruben, Angela Winbush, James Moody, Ahmad Jamal, Isley Brothers, Donny Hathaway, Richie Havens, Eddie Harris, Clarke Terry, Randy Crawford, Ralph Tresvant, Jackie Lomax, Al Green, and Bobby Brown.

Other teaching experience: Former Dean of Music Industries at McNally Smith College of Music; Executive Director of McNally Smith Foundation; Thornton School of Music’s Music Industry Department at the University of Southern California

Awards and Honors: forty Platinum and twenty-five Gold Albums, three Grammy™ Awards (including a Producer of the Year nomination in 1992), and four American Music Awards 

Memberships: National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (Former Los Angeles Chapter President).

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P.O.S. Drops New Album on February 3, 2009, Plays First Avenue Mainroom Saturday

Posted by Rod Smith on Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Nobody in music mixes wit and spleen with so much considered abandon.

Stefon “Stef” Alexander, AKA P.O.S., has long been adept at writing lyrics between everyday life’s cracks–a line here, a line there– wherever (including coffee shops, which he’s not particulary fond of), whenever inspiration strikes. According to the press release for Never Better (viewable on his MySpace page), the Minneapolis-based MC, Doomtree founding father, and Building Better Bombs frontman wrote most of his third album and second for Rhymesayers Entertainment in moving cars, meaning he’s probably been texting himself a lot since 2006’s Audition turned him into a veritable touring machine. Thrill-seekers reluctant to wait for the inevitable album release and homecoming (after he almost surely hits everyplace from Halifax to San Diego) shows might be able to cop a taste of the new stuff at Doomtree Blowout IV. Given the recession-adjusted cover ($10.00/$12.00!) and crew-inclusive lineup, satisfaction looms regardless.

Never Better Track Listing
1.Let It Rattle
2.Drumroll (We’re All Thirsty)
3.Savion Glover

4.Purexed
5.Graves (We Wrote the Book)
6.Goodbye
7.Get Smokes
8.Been Afraid
9.Low Light Low Life
10.The Basics (Alright)
11.Out of Category
12.Optimist (We Are Not For Them)
13.Terrorish
14.Never Better

15.The Brave and the Snake

Charles Bronsom as Death Wish’s Paul Kersey, a presence on every P.O.S. album to date. Twenty bucks says everybody’s favorite urban vigilante finds his way onto Never Better.

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Lessig! Lessig! Lessig! Three: Obama Deploys Exalted Webhead Search Party

Posted by Rod Smith on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

 Walking the walk behind much of his talk, Lessig drops a remix of a remix of his “Change Congress” remix at Web 2.0 Summit 2008.

For a few days last week, trawling for media-related change revelations made me feel like a stalker in deep space, harassing radiation, spying on gases, and making midnight breather calls to interstellar dust just to keep my A-game intact. What could be better? Even the wait itself offered little in the way of agony. Pacing around my living room like a caged wolverine is infinitely more fun than, say, watching TV, waxing a car, or playing Madden knee-deep in hot pocket wrappers. I might even end up missing it…soon. Between queuing up responses to far more urgent issues, O’s been putting all kinds of appointment balls in motion. On November 14, Change.gov announced the Obama-Biden Transition Project’s Science, Tech, Space, and Arts Team Leads. For the FCC, our Pres-elect tapped two of the best minds in their field. Let’s meet one.

Like fellow Team Lead Kevin Werbach, Susan Crawford has long championed a free and open Internet. She’s also hot on getting our speeds up to snuff.

Formerly a partner at  law firm Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering (now WilmerHale) and member of the Board of Directors for ICANN, One WebDay founder Professor Susan Crawford teaches communications law and internet law at the University of Michigan, blogs like a deity, and digs Second Life. She also understands networks and their potential better than any entity short of a galactic civilization.

Crawford rocks Rocketboom

 Wired called Kevin Werbach “one of the few policy wonks who really got it” long before he reached his current level of expertise…or helped start two guilds in World of Warcraft.

Former FCC Counsel for New Technology Policy and editor of Release 1.0, Supernova Group founder Kevin Werbach is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. and one of the first people major technology and communications companies go to for advice on the business, social, and policy implications of emerging technologies. Like Crawford, he harbors a vast trove of network-related knowledge and blogs magnificently. Werbach  knows Lessig and his work well–and vice versa–to the extent that during a 2006 Second Life in-world talk co-hosted by SL founder Philip Linden and LL, Werbach (as or through Neptune Rebel) greeted Lessig through a panelist and asked about his views on fair use and parody. Before answering the question, Lessig observed that he’d stolen every great idea Werbach had and turned it into a book, with many not yet written.

Smoother than  Ne-Yo, Werbach unpacks the Supernova Conference he founded eight years ago.

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Lessig! Lessig! Lessig! Halftime Show III (Final Act): Taiga! Taiga! Taiga!

Posted by admin on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Super-thick, beautifully printed gatefold jacket, double, 220 – gram, Czech virgin vinyl, jazz reimagined for electronics–all for around 20 bucks. No wonder I’m in like.

While the smoking ban has pretty much snuffed our live experimentica scene, Minneapolis suffers no lack of adventurous record labels. De Stijl, Roaratorio, Housepig, Tone Filth, Dark Winter, North American Hardcore, MP3 Death–even with Freedom From, Meniscus, and Doctsect in apparent slumber mode, I’d be hard pressed to finish singing the praises of all the above (not to mention the ones I’ve missed) if I started today and wrote straight through until Christmas. But I have a serious crush on Taiga Records, and it’s only getting worse: a couple nights ago, I picked up the year-old, vinyl-only label’s first relase–Rafael Toral’s Space–and I’m still regularly basking in its abstract glory. With four, high-quality, beautifully packaged titles to go, including the Deep Listening Band’s newly dropped Then & Now Now & Then, I’d better hurry, especially as the myserious* Eleh’s Homage to the Square Wave is already out of print. More soon.

Toral gets interstellar again.

 *Sure, it’s the word everybody uses to describe the planet’s hottest new drone entity…mainly ’cause hardly anybody knows anything about them…and those who do aren’t talking.

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Lessig! Lessig! Lessig! Half-time Show II: How I Spent My Halloween Vacation

Posted by Rod Smith on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

 White Iron Lake relaxes between mysterious moments.

Hearing a massive wolf chorus on the half-baked holiday immediately following my birthday didn’t faze me in the least.  Like most Devil’s Night babies, I love deep, raw sounds, and White Iron Lake, where I spent the weekend, offers plenty–not only of wolves, but their sled dog cousins, along with owls, loons,  ravens, woodpeckers (some the size of standard poodles, I swear), killer electrical storms, and winds that often sound as if  they’re coming from distant galaxies and getting more mysterious by the mile.

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Exploring Virtual Worlds (Lich King Chronicles I): Preparations for Northrend

Posted by Kyle Stallock on Monday, November 17th, 2008

Thirteen hours after Wrath of the Lich King hit store shelves worldwide, World of Warcraft celebrated its first “evel 80. ” Well, almost. With his hand-picked, number crunching crew, French player “Athene,” the self-described “best Paladin in the world,” exploited the game’s leveling system to land a character at level 79. Minutes before hitting 80, the sleep-deprived team’s members ran into a game master–one of WoW’s equivalents to America’s boys in blue–who immediately announced their suspension for exploiting game mechanics. Seconds later, and after over half a day of playing nonstop, the marathoners found themselves back at the login screen, unable to play. “We owned the game, but Blizzard owned us,”  their leader observed in a post-own video.

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Posted in Gaming, Multimedia | 4 Comments »

Exploitation, Censorship, Paying Extra for Endings, and WoW; a Week in Gaming News

Posted by admin on Friday, November 14th, 2008

Exploitations R Us

At Activision Blizzard’s latest earnings call, CEO Bobby Kotick claimed the company dumped the Ghostbusters game and industry legend Tim Schafer’s next title, Brutal Legend, because they couldn’t be “exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential to become $100 million dollar franchises.”  As he recently used “exploited” in the same comtext, we can now rest assured his first statement was no simple slip. The money-grubbing clown mild-mannered man-of-profit really does intend to milk the company’s biggest franchises for every possible fraction of a sliver of a cent, artistic merit be darned. Thankfully, a slew of indie developers–including Edmund McMillen and Petri Purho–regularly say “phooey” to the conglomerates and continue to release the innovative likes of Gish and Crayon Physics.

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Lessig Half-Time Show: Young Minneapolis Media Contender Loses Multiple Organs

Posted by admin on Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Minnesota’s collective bulb dims a bit in the wake of the MnIndy staff-trimming orgy.

“We are streamlining operations with a more centralized editorial system to support the entire news network as it grows,” Center for Independent Media president and CEO David S. Bennahum notes on the Minnesota Independent’s front page…three days after the Twin Cities Daily Planet revealed that the fledgling news powerhouse’s unabashedly liberal parent company had sacked two full-time reporters along with the former Minnesota Monitor’s entire freelance staff.

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Lessig! Lessig! Lessig! Pt. II: Why Lessig? Why, Look!

Posted by admin on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

Exploring the confluence of policy, technology, and art at Google’s New York office, Lessig keeps the long tail in a ferocious headlock just long enough to explain why it’s too narrow.

Just for fun, let’s blaze through the back story in one sentence: Born June 3, 1961 in Rapid City, South Dakota, Lawrence Lessig copped Economics and Management (Wharton School) degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, nabbed an M.A. in Philosophy from Cambridge, romanced a Law degree from Yale, taught at Harvard, clerked for judge Richard Posner (Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals) and Justice Antonin Scalia (United States Supreme Court), gloriously lost a Supreme Court challnge to the Sonny Bono Act, co-composed an Amici Brief defending 2600 in “MPAA vs. 2600,” cofounded Creative Commons, served on the EFF’s board, received the 2002 Award for the Advancement of Free Software, was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joined the Digital Universe project’s board of advisors, completed four books and did a bunch of other stuff before considering a bid for Congress in 2006 and wisely deciding to pass.

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Violent Videogames Linked to Aggressive Behavior and the Potential Aftermath

Posted by admin on Friday, November 7th, 2008

Give a kid a videogame, what happens next?

A recent, and apparently reputable, study has “confirmed” that violent videogames cause aggressive behavior among America’s youth.  Given that this topic has been beaten to a bloody Jared Leto in Fight Club pulp, I’m not as interested in the study’s validity as much as the repercussions. Given the new data, what will happen the next time anti-gaming fervor grips lawmakers eager to impress the people?

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Posted in Gaming, Industry, Multimedia | 1 Comment »

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