Hey, music pals.
TL;DR
I created this site called Spindle to encompass all that the wonderful eclectic Bristol music scene has to offer. You should either register as an artist / photographer / venue / promoter (more things to come maybe?) and help create a cool human-centric place online for your collective art to exist. If you'd rather just flick me a message on Instagram for more infos/chats then that's cool too.
The long version
I moved to Bristol in 2019, just before the pandemic hit the following March, which made the first 1-2 years in a new city quite unusual for someone that loves heading out to see live music (they were strange times for all, of course). So, a bit of a false start but gradually things returned to normal and I'd regularly rock down to The Crofter's Rights, The Exchange or The Lanes to catch a show. Bristol is a great city for music and over the last few years I've met a whole bunch of talented, driven people - not just music artists but photographers, illustrators, sound engineers, producers, promoters, the list goes on.
More recently, I found myself tyring to think of how I could do more to give back to it, and this is the best I can come up with:
Spindle. A site that hosts all manner of content relating to the Bristol music scene. Bands/artists, photographers, videographers, sound engineers, venues, studios, illustrators, visual artists, labels... *anything* embedded in the Bristol music scene itself can have a place here online, as a an all-encompassing resource, directory and place of general interest for anyone in or outside of the scene.
That's it. That's as far as I've got.
Oh and I think this is important too:
The early technologies that once held so much promise for artists and creatives have led us to a pretty bleak place. I imagine I have a pretty safe audience here but I don't see any true artistic value that AI offers*. It's sad to see it degrade and devalue a wealth of human expression and ceativity to a chorus of 'it's not going anywhere'. Right now AI output is generally pretty derivative and formulaic as you'd probably expect, but who knows where it goes from here. The music industry has experienced dramatic change over the last two decades with the advent of streaming services, and if the streaming model didn't present enough of a challenge for grassroots artists to make revenue more recently AI content creators have been quietly growing in number and attracting their own share of the listeners and revenue. In the past few months, some notable artists have chosen to leave Spotify due to its CEO having invested millions in military AI.
It's a mess, and I miss the days when a local scene can in many ways sustain itself without having to rely on these platforms so heavily.
So, let's give it a go shall we? Let's make Spindle the foremost way to connect with and support local human creatives.
Please feel free to register as an artist or get in touch.
* I like to think of myself as open-minded, and enjoy discussing differences in opinion. AI, at best, seems to serve as a way to save time or circumvent tasks that are considered labour intensive or mentally draining. There's much more to say around this subject, but in summary, my personal opinion is that this is at odds with the creative process.