Music Hack Day. Coming To A Scotland Near You Soon

We’re mighty excited to be part of the organising team for Music Hack Day Scotland: Scotland’s first dedicated music “hack” event in Edinburgh on August 24th/25th. It’s a chance for developers, designers, musicians and experimental tinkerers to come together to build innovative music projects in just 24 hours.

To launch the event, there’ll be a host of top drawer artists and pioneers of music innovation - such as creative director of the New Radiophonic Workshop Matthew Herbert, Scottish band FOUND, digital music service Spotify and local musicians Marco Donnarumma and Yann Seznec - who’ll be presenting some of their latest projects at Fringe venue Summerhall. This is free for anyone and everyone to attend (you don’t have to go to the full hack to come along - register here).

The 24-hour hack is then being hosted at Techcube, a brand new tech start-up incubation centre, where participants can come together to build music projects, using whatever data, technology and skills they have to hand. Some of the data available includes musical archive footage from National Museum Scotland, gig and band information from concert website Songkick and music available on services like Soundcloud and This Is My Jam. Participants may choose to make apps, web services, hardware, art, instruments or just plain music – it’s wide open, provided it’s music-related. Then everyone gets a chance to present their projects the following day, with prizes, from the likes of Spotify, going to the most inventive and creative.

The event will also form part of the Turing Festival, Scotland’s foremost technology and innovation conference, which takes place over the same weekend, and will take part during Edinburgh Fringe. And in keeping with ethos of music hack days the launch party and hack event are completely free.

For further information, to receive tickets and to register for online updates visit: scotland.musichackday.org

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Music Hack Day Scotland is also being organised by the Scottish Music Industry Association and Lucky Frame.

It’s official. The music video for Plum’s new single The Seed is now live on Vimeo.

Using 70 metres of cardboard, a few boxes of audio cables and a lot of patience, the video uses stop-motion animation to create an eerie dreamworld, with a dark twist.

Featuring the The Seed single - released 29th February - from the Scottish Songwriter and Producer’s forthcoming concept album of the same name, Plum sees a mystery box delivered to her front door with equally mysterious instructions as to what to do with it.

What happens when the seed of an idea is planted? If we sleep on it, will it grow beyond our control? Once a box is open can the contents ever fully be put back inside?

Using a stop-motion style meant production was a slow process - it took one day to shoot only 10 seconds of material - but all in all the film took 2 weekends to build and shoot, 4 days to prepare and edit, and involved no post-processing. And all on a budget to cover a lighting rig and few packs of crisps.

If you like it, please share it far and wide. We’ve entered it into Vimeo’s Music Video Awards, so trying to give it the best possible chance.

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Music: Plum - The Seed // plumtunes.com

Directed, filmed and edited by Greg Hoyna // greghoyna.com

Written and produced by Jim Wolff, Jordan Laird and Michael Kinlan from Leith Records // leithrecords.com