BETALEVEL

Piracy – Karaoke – Conviviality

Saturday, July 28
9pm until late
Free

So, we were sitting at a stoplight the other night, facing a billboard for Mindfreak, and it reminded me that I’d been thinking about The Crow recently. I don’t know why, but I had. There was a time when I was really into that movie.

Remember the nineties? Remember when Nine Inch Nails covering Joy Division might’ve sounded like a good idea? Remember when the world wide web was new and exciting and, gee, isn’t Mosaic neat?

Yeah, it’s all a bit hazy for us too. We’re just glad that this whole ‘internets’ thing is finally blowing over. Nice to see that the kids are finally rediscovering — well, rediscovering people. And we’re glad to be doing our part in all this, however small.

The internet — it was fun while it lasted.

About Swap Meet

Swap Meet is a monthly gathering where you can come with your favorite music files and trade them with other physical human people. Then, holler along with the dulcet tones of handcrafted MIDI karaoke. It’s like the Internet, but with people and beer.

Here’s the (outdated and incomplete) house karaoke list, so you can prepare yourself. If something you’d like to sing is not on the list, you are welcome — nay, encouraged! — to bring your own hand-crafted .KAR files. They’re MIDI-tastic!

What to Bring

• bring: drinks, or a kindly donation (optional)
• bring: your singin’ voice and dancin’ shoes (optional)
• bring: some storage media and/or a Swap Pack (optional)
• bring: a defiant sense of joy in the face of our eroding cultural freedoms (required)

Swap Pack Themes

This month we turned off the supercomputers and went to the park. After a long afternoon’s barbeque, we agreed on the following theme: Hey, this is nice — what is it, velvet?

Swap Pack how-to

• 1. Take note of the one or two themes chosen for a given month’s Swap Packs
• 2. Pick out 128 Mb of music (roughly 25-40 MP3s) which interprets, tangents, or ignores one of said themes
• 3. Put the music into a folder
• 4. Put the folder onto portable media (flash drives are handy)
• 5. Take your portable media to Swap Meet
• 6. Swap
• 7. And then we sing!
• (For more details, see the Swap Pack FAQ.)

Some questions you might have and some answers we might have

Do I need to have an iPod to come?
No. Many people come with hard drives, flash drives, or other alternate file storage devices/media.

Must I swap files at all?
No. You don’t have to swap to sing.

Wait — must I sing?
No. You don’t have to sing to swap. Indeed, you don’t have to sing or swap and you can still be powerfully entertained by the singing and the whatnot. (But beware the power of MIDI karaoke. Maybe you didn’t intend to sing Phil Collins…)

Swap Meet is presented by Superbunker and The Royal Academy of Nuts + Bolts.
For more information and helpful links, please see the Superbunker Swap Meet project page.

Please note:
According to recent legal decisions, inducing anyone to use physical space for the purpose of sharing music may render the space-time continuum illegal. Use the space-time continuum at your own risk.

Make Swap Meet your friend.