Bad Smell is mad-professor Ray Fork and drum powerhouse Jane Boxall serving up electro-ambient trance / dance Latin '70s Europop. They will headline on Saturday, July 27, 2024. Ferocious rockers

Tinkerbullet

will also be featured, and

Ezra Holloway

's new band will open. It will be loud. Dancing will be encouraged. Show starts at 7:00 PM. Tickets are $20 in advance or at the door. Advance tickets guarantee entry. As always, ticket proceeds go to the performers and the event will be recorded and filmed.

A rare live show by experimental pop collective

SOOL

at Stage 33 Live in association with community radio station WOOL-FM on Thursday, August 15, 2024. Show starts at 6:00 PM. It will be loud. Dancing will be encouraged. The band will do a radio interview in the next room on WOOL-FM at 5:00, ticket holders are invited to come early and heckle them live on the air. At the band's request, tickets are just $10 in advance or at the door. Only 40 tickets will be sold, advance tickets guarantee entry. As always, ticket proceeds go to the performers and the event will be recorded and filmed.

Darkly hilarious and dead serious singer-songwriter

Grant Peeples

and globetrotting, truth-telling troubadour

Fred Gillen, Jr.

will co-headline on August 18, 2024, at 6:00 PM. Tickets are $20 in advance or at the door. Only 40 tickets will be sold; advance tickets guarantee entry. As always, ticket proceeds go to the performers and the event will be recorded and filmed.

For reasons unknown, our YouTube channel views plummeted off a cliff a week or so back.Something changed in the algorithm, or we unknowingly did something that angered the video gods.Check out Tom Pirozzoli and Rupert Wates though! Rupert's set is still going up, one per day in performance order. There's a few left. 

Updated the Volunteers page on the website. If anybody's interested in helping all the things happen, door's open!

Here's a show that isn't ours but it would be kinda great if it was: Jon Langford and the Bright Shiners, this Friday June 14 at 7:30 in the Windham Ballroom adjacent to Ciao Popolo, hosted by those Ray's The Roof Productions people. Welsh musician and artist Langford is perhaps most notably known as a Mekon and a Waco Brother; the band features Alice Spencer (of Barkers and Shinyribs) on shared lead vocals and Mellotron, John Szymanski (of Four Lost Souls) on vocals and guitar, and Tamineh Gueramy (a deputy Mekon) on violin and vocals. Tickets at this brutal link —https://tickets.bellowsfallsoperahouse.com/bellowsfallsoperahouse/website/EventDetails.aspx?EventId=55401—  or, if it's not sold out, at the door. 

Remember how we asked last time if anybody would be into helping tag our back-catalog of clips? Turned out that nobody was into it, which is OK. (You still can if you want to though, it's way more not-done than done.) Anyway, tagging the library is part of this project: We worked up a pilot / proof-of-concept episode of terrestrial TV and radio broadcast programming.Wanna look?

Here's dev jabber about it that's simultaneously really exciting and really boring.This is the first of three working-out-the-kinks proofs-of-concept. Learned a lot, mostly things to NOT do, which have mostly been corrected, and which are being applied to the second proof already begun. (Our advisors had good advice about clip order which isn't reflected in this one but will be going forward.) If you spot something troublesome, we'll for sure want to hear about it, please email [email protected] There won't be a theme song... the billboard will use a song from the episode. Broadcasters can use the billboard as a teaser in the days leading up to broadcast.There's one visual bit in the billboard that goes by almost too fast to grok... that's on purpose. It's meant to get people to pay attention to subsequent views, even if it's just because they're annoyed.There also won't be a talking head, just a disembodied voice. It's a choice. No traditional credits either, another choice. (The way things are right now, it would just be embarrassing to have credits. The credits thing will change once it's not Mark doing it all.)The audio will be able to stand alone for audio-only platforms.The plan had been to adhere to a strict clock, but that's gone out the window. Far too much hassle. National broadcasters are really the only ones who care a lot about that anyway. Our highest hope is to land on one or more of the regional public TV and radio syndicates, which are more flexible. Things will also be distributed on as many PEG and NCE servers as we can find, too.Plus there's intent to release the episodes as podcasts as well, both audio and video, even though podcasting is a total morass these days... impossible to make a foothold in the choking sea of everything half-baked and half-assed under the sun or in mom's basement. But it would be shameful to not do it, being 99% of the way there anyway. According to Buzzsprout (one of the biggest podcast-hosting platforms), if a new episode of a podcast gets more than 30 downloads in its first week, it's in the top 50% of all podcasts. The top HALF of ALL podcasts. Thirty downloads. That's sobering. More than 115 downloads in the first week, that's better than 75% of all podcasts. 470 puts it in the top 10%.The podcast math isn't encouraging. The overall notion is to make evergreen episodes available in batches of a dozen for broadcasters to air however they see fit. Podcasts will be released monthly. Making a dozen of these things is a tall order though.Noncommercial television and radio are restricted from broadcasting advertising, but underwriting and sponsorship recognition are allowed within fairly strict guidelines. Recognition for performance-season underwriters will be embedded at the end of every episode... these are seasonal sources of significant (for us) financial or physical support. We wouldn't exist without that help. (These recognitions have to appear at the end per public television production guidelines.) The plan is to also offer two premium broadcast-underwriting recognitions on a per-episode basis... plus, for the podcasts, three ad slots on a per-episode basis. According to people who study things like this, weekly podcast listeners consider 3.8 ads per 60-minute episode appropriate.Podcast ads will be 30 seconds or less. Broadcast recognitions will be up to 12 seconds, and also included in the podcasts.Haven't worked up pricing for anything yet (we'll entertain offers though).Looking to public TV and radio for guidance on local and regional program-specific underwriting, the costs vary widely based on market — anything from a few tens to a few hundreds bucks for a single spot on a single station. For multi-station syndicates like Vermont and New Hampshire have, it's more. And for national programming it's waaaay more.The podcast stuff ain't gonna be a breadwinner. For generic on-the-fly inserts, the average CPM (cost per 1000 listens) ranges between $15 to $40. The price is higher for niche and special-interest podcasts, which we are, and higher again for permanent host-read embedding, which is the plan. Mainly we just hope to generate enough podcast revenue for a paid provider to be the primary podcast repository and CSS source. 

We got approval for our 2025 calendar from the building owners and tenants (anything we do in the room is only through their grace), so booking for next year will start shortly... first-come first-served from the wait list. Hopefully we'll finally be resolving the last of the Covid lockdown postponements, and we've had an astonishingly fluid acoustic guitar player from France who has been trying to mesh his schedule with ours since 2019 — hope this will at last be his year (and ours).Other than that we're not up to much.