As has been widely reported, the UK’s largest independent entertainment distributor, PIAS, suffered the complete loss of stock in an enormous warehouse in North London amidst rioting in the neighborhood. Impacted is stock not only in music, but independent film, too. The warehouse is owned by Sony DADC, but the impacted stock is owned by distributor PIAS and covers some 150 record labels (see list below), from big names to tiny – and more vulnerable – outlets.

While details on insurance coverage and timing are largely forthcoming, the more urgent problem is that – insurance payments or no – the loss of significant portions or even all stock for many smaller record labels impacts their ability to operate. Because producing something like a CD or vinyl requires manufacturing, lead time, and shipping logistics, the event could have a devastatingly constraining effect on the ability of these labels to sell physical music.

Some relevant coverage:

Independent music labels left ‘devastated’ by riot fire [BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat]

Sony/PIAS Warehouse Burnt Down in UK Riots [Pitchfork]

Sony: London warehouse fire may affect UK deliveries [Reuters]

Independent record labels fear ruinous stock loss in London riots fire [The Guardian]

On the film side: British film distributors left reeling by financial impact of Sony/PIAS warehouse fire [The Guardian]

Via Twitter, Rough Trade Shops are following events and encouraging volunteers to work on cleanup and fundraising efforts. The focus remains on the immediate safety of artists and staff, naturally, for all London’s arts institutions, and thankfully, while the loss of physical music was devastating, no injuries were reported.

Here’s the latest update from PIAS, as of Tuesday pm:

Latest update – Sony DADC have actioned their Business Continuity Plan and are back up and running from a new control room in Enfield. PIAS continue to work with them to minimise the impact on the business, a number one priority for all our labels and clients. Sony DADC have identified a temporary distribution partner and it is envisaged that they will be in a position to pick, pack and ship orders in the course of next week.

This follows an earlier statement regarding a fire last night at the SonyDADC warehouse, which services the physical distribution for PIAS in the UK and Ireland. PIAS’s UK offices in London and all other areas of our business are unaffected.

Further details will follow tomorrow morning, Wednesday.

We wish to thank everyone for the overwhelming messages of support.

Follow PIAS directly for the latest official statements:
http://www.pias.com/pias/

Benefit plans are thus far mostly at a placeholder status, but there’s reason to believe that the future of a number of the UK’s record labels could be endangered by events.

In addition to a direct fund, simply buying digital releases from these labels could help – and illustrates that having digital revenues can be a way to resist catastrophic problems elsewhere.
AIM urges fans to buy digital and help out indies affected by warehouse fire [MusicWeek]

Our friend TRICIL is already using the Topspin platform in order to give away his entire 47-track discography in exchange for a donation that will support the recovery of these labels.

http://tricil.net/

Some of those record labels:

LABEL NAME
[PIAS] Recordings
[PIAS] Recordings Belgium
4AD
A Camp
Absynthe Minded
Accidental
AEI Music
Air Recordings
ALC Music
Alsation
Ambush Reality
Ancient & Modern
Angular Recording Corporation
Arcady Records
Ark Recordings
Asthmatic Kitty Records
Atlantic Jaxx Recordings
Bad Magic
Balling The Jack
Banquet Records
Battered Ornaments Records
Beggars Banquet
Best Before
Big Brother
Big Dada
Bird Records
blackmaps
Bloody Chamber
Blowout Music
Blue Chopsticks
Border Community
Borstal Beats
Boysnoize Records
BPM
Brainfeeder
Brassland
Bright Star Recordings
Brille
Broken Sound Music
Bronzerat
Brothers and Sisters
Brownswood Recordings
Buzzin’ Fly
Cache Cache
Cadenza Records
Celluloid Records
Chalkmark / IE
Chemikal Underground Records
Cocoon
Control Tower
Counter Records
Dance To The Radio
Dead Oceans
Deceptive
Defenders Ent UK
DESOLAT
Dessous
Different
Dirtee Stank
Divine Comedy Records
Domino Records
Double Six Records
Drag City
Dreambrother
Drive Thru Records
Drowned In Sound
Dummy Records
Duophonic
Eat Sleep Records
Fabric Worldwide
Fake Diamonds
FantasyTrashcan
Fatcat Records
Fence
Feraltone
Finders Keepers Records
Flock Music
Flying Circus
Freerange Records
Friends Vs Records
Full Pupp
Full Time Hobby
Gang Of Four Recordings
Geographic
Ghost Ship
Glaze Recordings
Groenland Records
G-Unit
Hardly Art
Hassle Records
Helpless
Hem Hem Records
HFN Music
Immune
Independiente
Infant
Infectious
Jagjaguwar
Kartel
Kitchenware
Kitsune
KMS Records / Fabric
Laughing Stock
Lex Records
Lipservice
Little Sister Recordings
LO-MAX Records
Loose Music
Lovepump United
Low Life Records
Lucky Number Music
Lucky Seven Records
Mantra
Matador
Memphis Industries
Merok
Metric Music International
Metroline Limited
Model Citizen
Moikai
Motion Audio
MyMajorLabel Ltd
Nation
Ninja Tune
No Quarter
NovaMute
Nusic Sounds
One Four Seven Records Ltd
One Little Indian
Organs
Outcaste
OVNI
P.I.L.
Peartree Records
PeMa
People In The Sky
People Tree
Pirates Blend Records Inc
Planet Function
Play It Again Sam
Playlouder
Poker Flat
Polyvinyl Records
Poseidon Records
Post Present
Pschent
Raw Canvas
Red Cord Records
REK’D
Rekids
Rekords Rekords
Renaissance
Reveal Records
Riverman Records
Rock Action Records
Roots Records
Rough Trade Records
Rubyworks
Sea Note
Search and Destroy
Secretly Canadian
Setanta
Shape
SideOneDummy Records
Silva Screen
Slam Dunk Records
Smekkleysa
Soma
Sonic Cathedral
Soul Jazz Records
South Paw
Southern Fried Records
Stereo Bang Media
Stolen Recordings
Stranger Records
Streamline
Sub Pop
Suicide Squeeze
Sunday Best
Thrill Jockey
Tirk
Too Pure
Torque Records
Touch & Go Records
Transmission Recordings
Tri Tone
Trouble Records
True Panther
Try Harder
Turnstile
Twisted Nerve Recordings
Universal Sound
Victory Records
Wagram
Wall of Sound
Warp
Watergate
We Love You
Wiiija
Willkommen Records Ltd
Wonderfulsound
XL
Xtra Mile Recordings
Yaala Yaala
Young Turks

PIAS also shares music on SoundCloud:

Latest tracks by PIAS Entertainment

Updated: Wednesday Statement from PIAS

Kenny Gates, PIAS’ Founder & CEO, posts an updated message today. He notes that all PIAS staff are okay, and reiterates that SONY DADC, not PIAS, actually owns the warehouse; PIAS contracts with SONY in order to house their product for distribution.

As you have noticed in our last note , Sony DADC have been remarkably quick and efficient to put together a contingency plan that should allow us to ship to stores sometime next week. We are impressed by their efficiency and that is good news.

These times are difficult for us, our artists, our labels and the whole indie sector which we vastly represent but we are determined to come out of this setback in the best way possible.

The PIAS team has been working around the clock to limit the damage . We know that the livelihood of many talented, passionate and hard working music people, artists and small and bigger labels is at stake and depend on our actions and those of Sony DADC.

We have been getting a lot of words of support and offers of help and that truly helps.

Thank you to everybody who cares and supports PIAS and the indie sector.

Read the full statement:
http://www.pias.com/pias/message-from-kenny-gates

CDM has gotten no further word on efforts to support the labels, so our view is that the best course of action is to wait on additional information.

Updated: Answers on Fundraising Efforts from Organizers

Representatives of Label Love have answered CDM questions and explained why labels are in need, how fundraising efforts are working, and what you might do to help:
In Wake of London Fire, Organizers Answers Questions About Supporting Indie Labels [CDM]

A hive mind mentality is quickly infected with a meme, engaging partly consciously, partly unconsciously in a shared hallucination, projecting a common fantasy, as the planet’s population is wrapped up in a single idea. I’m speaking, of course, of myself and the Internet, as I and friends skittered across the Web’s social networking tools giggling over the common joke that May 21 was to be the end of the world, inside joke gone viral. In fact, I’m not sure which was the commentary on religion and faith: the handful of people who believed the world would end, or the far-larger media and Web commentary, “worshiping” at Foursquare check-ins. Thanks be to Facebook. The lesson: it’s fun to play along.

Music can respond to these imagined scenarios in moving ways. (Scientists and atheists are pretty good at conceiving the apocalypse, too, so this doesn’t cease to be topical, at least until the end.) Here are just two examples that, even though the occasion has passed, I know I’ll be listening to this week — an Eigenharp jam and a Loscil mix.

Via Synthtopia’s Sunday Synth Jam, our friend bar|none has a gorgeous live jam on the alternative instrument Eigenharp. (Recently, I pointed to Philip Glass covers and GPL software for the instrument; see also extended commentary from the players.)

The otherworldly sounds come from KYMA, the inconceivably-deep digital synthesis environment. bar|none explains:

This is a bit of noodling with a KYMA sound designed by Edmund Eagan for the Continuum that I adapted for the Eigenharp.

As you can hear, it has a lot of per note expression. Each key controls, velocity, pitch, timbre (reresonation of the strings), volume. phase, pick sound mix using roll, yaw, pressure, velocity of the keys, each key sending all this information INDEPENDENTLY!

There is a bit of bowed cello added which comes in only when I use the strip controller, everything else is one KYMA sound.

I’d like to extend my appreciation to Geert Bevin who designed the new MIDI configuration options for EigenD and made this connection possible. And of course to Edmund Eagan for this amazing sound, and to Symbolic Sound for KYMA.

For more of bar|none’s music, visit the blog of this Washington state-based “software developer by day, music enthusiast by night.”
http://bar0.blogspot.com

In other news, CDM favorite and ambient maestro Loscil contributes an entire mix of end-of-the-world music. It’s streaming on the terrific Web streaming service Mixcloud, with music by the likes of Ben Frost, Tim Hecker, and Max Richter, but also Nick Cave, Estonian composer Arvo Part, and film composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, among others.

I believe I owe a Facebook friend the original pleasure of listening, but when I couldn’t find that, I found this on a wonderful music blog. This one post alone could give you great listening for the rest of the day.

Passing by: Dauwd, sgnl_fltr, Adam X, Loscil & Matthias Rock [astrangelyisolatedplace]

There’s an insanely rich set of ambient and electronic mixes, and links to appropriate blogs. Whoever you are, sir, thinks for the great work, described as:

Biosphere’s Norwegian Winter.
Eno’s inspirational airports.
The Orb’s psychedelic London.
Aphex Twin’s Cornish isolation.
The KLF’s American road-trip.
Harold Budd’s Mojave desert humming telephone wires

To me, the power of music remains that it can make you feel better when it seems as though your world is apocalyptic. And if we do ever find ourselves in the midst of an apocalypse and have the strength to make a sound, I imagine the band will play on.

We are, as every generation, part of a planetary history that’s bigger than anyone can really comprehend, but of which we’re a part. So, music isn’t terribly good at making specific policy prescriptions, or solving tangible problems, or feeding people – all vitally important things. But nothing can express hope or feeling like music. New York’s public radio station WFUV plays on their live stream today songs of peace and a nice set by John Lennon, which I’m listening to at the moment.

I’m curious to hear readers’ favorite music that expresses hope for peace. You can take that to apply to whatever news story there is in the world at the moment – really, absolutely any story. You can do it in a way that transcends any ability to editorialize or analyze. And that music can include electronic and instrumental pieces, as very often those pieces are forgotten, but I know have been comforting and inspiring to me, or I wouldn’t do what I do. Readers, chime in in comments.

Unlike news or editorials, I do believe music can speak to something deeper than any one day’s headlines, to the way we feel about being human. I spend a lot of my time with words, but music still says things I can never put into words.

Answers from readers:

Symptoms of a False Awakening blog names Alice Coltrane – Blue Nile (via @mbytz)

Imagine, says @mtnsound

New to me, but not, I suspect, if you were watching Eurovision in 1982 (I was busy being American and four): “ein bisschen Frieden” by Nicole. So says @tillephone

Lots more in comments – please keep adding.

A week ago today a 9.0-magnitude earthquake shook northern Japan, leaving much of the area in utter devastation.  For the past week, all eyes have been on the island nation, most prominently due to the affects the quake has had on nuclear reactors in the area.  Only one day before the quake, Laurent Fintoni made his annual trip to the place he calls his spiritual home.  Laurent is the man behind the Rhythm Incursions site, Original Cultures project and a host of other things in and around the world of modern electronic music.  In the immediate aftermath of the quake, he housed up with Rhythm Incursions co-presenters Raid System and started work on a compilation to be released to support the relief efforts.  Today, exactly one week after the quake, that compilation Nihon Kizuna has been released with a stellar lineup of over 40 artists including Kode 9, Kuedo, Rudi Zygadlo, Daisuke Tanabe, Paul White, Mux Mool, Ernest Gonzales, Onra and many more.

You can listen to a short mix of the music included in the compilation below or just go straight to the Nihon Kizuna site and purchase the compilation.

V.A. – Nihon Kizuna (日本絆) by laurentfintoni

Updated: TRUE CHIP TILL DEATH has a chip music compilation going, too. I know there are many others, so feel free to add them in comments.
http://truechiptilldeath.com/japan/

We live in a fragile world, and I’m immensely grateful for the opportunities we’re gifted to share ideas about music making and engineering, sound and tools.

I will continue our regular content, but I also want to ask all of our readers to reflect on our friends and colleagues impacted directly and indirectly by the aftermath of Friday’s tsunami, earthquake, and nuclear crisis. It is to date one of the most far-reaching disasters in its connection to the larger audience for this site, though we remain sensitive to loss throughout our community worldwide. I want to specifically send our thoughts to our Japanese readers, and our friends at Korg, Roland, Yamaha, and too many other manufacturers and press outlets to name as they face the challenges ahead.

We rely on electricity and network availability to even be connected to one another via this outlet; recent events in Egypt and Japan correlate to odd silences in countries that otherwise make large showings in server logs. But absent those connections, we can still contribute.

I’m sure there will be musical benefits; one such sound design project is being discussed at the monome forum. But as we as musicians and artists share one larger global community (this site alone registers visits from seven continents, and we’re English-only), here are good ways to give. All are in what I’ve been able to research efficient, generous, and well-respected organizations, and all equip themselves to handle not only these most recent events, but unexpected crises around the world. I’ll be giving on CDM’s behalf.

International Rescue Committee
Global Giving
American Red Cross | International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Tech writer Rick Martin has compiled an excellent list of ways to give sorted by where you are in the world.

Updated: See also the record label 12k online shop who are giving 100% of profits (and are themselves supporters of Japanese music), and, in turn, their beneficiary Japan Society’s relief fund

It’s easy for the other things we do to seem meaningless in the face of tragedy, but I believe that part of why we share with each other, commercially and culturally, with music and with tools, is because it is a gift to do so, to be part of a greater community of people. Wherever you are in the world, I can’t thank you enough for that.

I’m late in posting this, but it’s too good to pass up – our friend Troels Folmann sends us his latest sound design experiment, this time with bees.

Better audio:
Bees by Tonehammer

Specs:

• 200-230 wing flaps per second (hence the tone)
• Top speed: 15 mph.
• Compound eyes with thousands of tiny lenses plus simple eyes.
• A life form with 20,000 known species, on which human life depends
• Availability: with our protection, a long, long time. Without, we’re toast.

There’s also a free bee sample set for use with Kontakt or (via WAV) any other tool. [Download link, .rar ]

We’d love to hear music you make with those samples. If you compose something, send them to us in comments!

Lots of additional info:
Music Made with Bees [tonehammer]

Bee populations are in decline, which is a deep concern. Happily, at least one culprit has been ruled out: research suggests mobile phones are not to blame after all.

The New York Times has a good recent article on bees, why they’re so important to human life and agriculture, the disturbing rapid decline in their population, and a breakthrough that’s occurred in the last week. The news isn’t good: colony collapse, and it may be linked to a combination fungus/virus. Hopefully this new evidence will lead to a solution.
Trouble in the Hive, by Kirk Johnson for the NY Times

You can support bee research here: http://www.helpthehoneybees.com/

(In this case, surprisingly, academia teamed up with the US Army chemical and biological research group. It’s nice to see a non-destructive military application of chemicals and biology.)

The connection to sound, though, is clear to me: just as photographs or video can help us get closer to subjects that matter, so can sound and music. They’re another way of experiencing our world. So send in that bee music.

A California ban of the sale of violent video games to minors may not seem relevant to the world of music on first blush. But the music industry, joining everyone from software makers to legal groups to state Attorneys General, feels otherwise. Overzealous restriction of the sale of games, these groups say, is tantamount to an attack on rights of free speech protected by the United States Constitution. And while the California law would make a separate set of rules for gaming, the message from the music industry, as others, is clear: diminish the freedom of one medium, and you diminish us all.

In addition to the National Association of Broadcasters, The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) joins an amicus brief with booksellers, publishers, novelists and writers, music retailers, “amusement and music operators,” and the Recording Academy, jointly filing their protests with the US Supreme Court.

Amongst the authorities cited in that brief: reviews of the game Halo, histories of banned books and laws concerning free speech, violence in Elizabethan England, and Homer and Aeschylus. (Yes, Homer’s Iliad Book 13 sits alongside Grand Theft Auto.) Even Punch & Judy, Tom and Jerry, and Little Red Riding Hood make an appearance. So does the Bible.

Of course, the music industry is sensitive to these attacks, having been at the business end of similar, ill-fated litigation. Books, magazines, newspapers, television, broadcasting, music – there simply isn’t a medium in America that hasn’t had to fight off similar complaints.

There are various arguments for whether or not gaming is reviewed as art, though here, there’s enough legal precedent to assume they are, in the eyes of the law. More telling, however, is the observation that “protection accorded to depictions of violence did not turn on … merit.” (The case cited in the brief protected gory, grisly images and descriptions of crime, which New York law tried to ban in the 1940s. At the time, the Supreme Court conceded it couldn’t understand why you’d want such a thing, but that merit was not the basis for the ruling.)

And that’s the bottom line: free speech is not about merit, or one medium or another, just as this Supreme Court decision is as much about music or words as it is about games.

The precedent, legally, is clear, leaving only the “newness” of the technology as a defense. Here’s the brief’s response to that issue:

California also appears to suggest that the new technologies represented by video games require a reassessment of First Amendment principles. Technological change usually causes fear and uncertainty.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, technological change has repeatedly revolutionized entertainment media and communications, as well as the storage, retrieval, and distribution of information. Each of these technological advances—movies, television, the Internet, and now handheld, interactive electronic video games—has brought with it the fear that the new technology would corrupt the young. But there is no reason to permit fear of novel technologies to diminish fundamental constitutional rights such as the First Amendment.

For any artist, for anyone in the business of expression, this is a case to watch, at least in regards to US law.

More reading:
Merit Briefs/Amicus Briefs, Schwarzenegger, Gov. of California v. Entertainment Merchants, Assn., Docket No. 08-1448 [American Bar Association]

At stake in Terminator vs. video games? “The future of media”
[Ars Technica]

The brief cited here:
Brief for the American Booksellers Foundation For Free Expression, Association of American Publishers, Freedom to Read Foundation, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers, Recording Industry Association of America, Amusement & Music Operators Association, the Association of National Advertisers, Pen Center USA, and the Recording Academy in Support of Respondent [PDF]

Visualization often wins out over sonification when it comes to making data clear. But sound has one key advantage: it can make time and scale apparent, by tapping directly into our perception of forward time.

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto, born well into the Nuclear Age in 1959, uses that property to chilling effect. The sounds in “1945-1998″ are made still more unsettling in their rendering as tranquil, musical sounds rather than explosions. Quietly, World War III is waged not in wartime, but in the 2053 nuclear explosions that erupt mainly in thermonuclear tests (led, ironically, by the United States). This isn’t just political noise, either; the scale of thermonuclear tests has made virtually everyone reading this site a child of the fallout of the testing age, quite literally. And this falls on the anniversary of the deadly blasts detonated by the US to close World War II.

The 2003 work was dedicated as a kind of universal message, thanks to its rendering in sound:

This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world

Sound, after all, can convey real messages, not only about our past and tragedy, but about our future.

Hosted by the people working to end nuclear testing worldwide
Via our friend David Auerbach at Digitalfix.

Nashville locals Jeremy Dickens (logickal) and Tony Youngblood were on-site this month for CDM to cover the Nashville’s NAMM show, the summer installment of the major music manufacturer trade show.

The Summer 2010 edition of the North American Music Merchants trade show (Summer NAMM to most of us) has come and gone. For three days in humid downtown Nashville, members of the gear manufacturing, distribution, and retailing businesses converged upon the convention center to see the latest new merchandise being brought to market. This year, however, they did so against the backdrop of a city whose economy faces an uncertain future in the wake of the devastating flooding that displaced thousands of people and did billions of dollars in property damage.

In the background, there were some interesting signs regarding the uneasy state of the industry as a whole. According to the official numbers, overall attendance was down by 4% from last year, although overall exhibitor numbers were “slightly up.” It wasn’t difficult to overhear the disappointment and frustration in the conversations of sales people on the show floor. Michael Fine, a representative for guitar brands such as G&L and ESP, was quoted by the local media as saying that “Everybody’s sales were down at least 25 percent last year, mine included.”

NAMM music gear trade show is ‘hurting’ this year [Tennessean.com]
See NAMM’s press release for numbers and a slightly different angle. -Ed.

Meanwhile, many of the attendees were disappointed by the lack of representation from some of the bigger names in the industry. Gone are the days of an Ableton, once distributed by M-Audio, announcing new versions of Live on Saturday Morning; that company, like many others, reserves the honor exclusively for events like Anaheim’s Winter NAMM show. Indeed, M-Audio and their new parents Avid were easy to miss in the crowd, having a small display of product and scheduled Pro Tools demos hidden among the racks of Hal Leonard Publishing’s music books. The show that once sprawled across two floors of the Nashville Convention Center and the adjacent arena now fit almost entirely within the confines of the Center’s main exhibit hall. Even with Summer NAMM’s well-deserved reputation as a “guitar show,” the larger guitar manufacturers were conspicuous in their absence.

That being said, Nashville’s participation in the yearly NAMM schedule is an important one for other reasons. The influx of travelling convention participants is something the local economy counts on for tax dollars — now more than ever. The city’s other main convention center, Gaylord Opryland Hotel, is closed until November after sustaining heavy flood damage, causing the cancellation or relocation of many events previously booked for this summer. That leaves events like NAMM with the burden of bringing badly-needed revenue to the city. More strikingly, the show and its exhibitors are working with ongoing efforts to assist local musicians and studios in recovering their lost possessions and livelihoods in the wake of the floods.

Nashville electronic musician Tony Gerber [artist site @ reverbnation] is a direct recipient of such aid. Gerber is a solo artist, member of space music ensemble Spacecraft, and active in the music performance scene in Second Life as Cypress Rosewood. He’s had his music life put on hold after the flood, losing approximately 80% of his and his family’s possessions. Despite those losses, he sees the ordeal as a “positive experience,” largely due to the assistance of friends, fellow area musicians organizing a benefit concert in his behalf, and the Recording Academy-associated relief organization MusiCares.

While MusiCares provides aid to individuals in the music industry during many types of crises, they acted quickly to establish an active presence in Nashville’s music community, offering expedited financial aid to cover losses. They also partnered with retailer Guitar Center to collect equipment donations at their stores nationwide and to offer discounted prices on replacement gear to flood victims. While details are kept confidential, MusiCares staff member Courtney Bailey said that they had given out approximately $250,000 to flood victims since their establishment.

It wasn’t only individual studios to suffer losses: local cartage and equipment storage facility Soundcheck was inundated as well, with the accumulated wealth of over 600 musicians from the broad spectrum of Nashville’s music scene suffering loss and damage. Even some of the smaller exhibitors on the show floor had been touched by the destruction: Mark Payung of Glasstones [Facebook link] had kept some of his company’s prototype guitars at a locker at Soundcheck. “It was really a depressing site. It was so bad they had signs that said ‘Beware of Snakes.’ Going in and seeing all my gear destroyed was heartbreaking.”

Despite the flood and despite the economy, retailers and buyers still came to Summer NAMM 2010 to do business. It’s unclear at this point whether we’re experiencing a few bad years or a downward trend that could change the way the music manufacturing industry operates. We may be able to tell more from Winter NAMM, where manufacturers customarily pull out the big guns. Until then, Nashville restocks, refinishes, repairs, and rebuilds.

Contributor Jeremy Dickens is a native Nashvillian musician, engineer, sound designer and and producer with works on dPulse Recordings, Sony Digital and his own Discrepancy Recordings imprint.

Tony Youngblood (photos, additional reporting) resides in Nashville, TN and hosts the experimental improv music podcast Theatre Intangible. [twitter]

Nashville Flood Relief:
http://www.unitedwaynashville.org/nashvilleflood/

Nashville is a special place for music, and just as any natural disaster in the world hits musical communities, so, too, has recent flooding taken its toll on this American city.

The NAMM summer convention, a top gathering for the musical instruments industry, will go ahead as planned in Nashville on the 18th through the 20th of this month. For their part, industry group NAMM says that they’ll pump some $13 million into the local economy. Other efforts:

The MusiCares flood relief fund, targeting aid to local musicians, will host a booth and silent instrument auction. If you want to donate your instrument, with 100% of proceeds going directly into aid benefits, you can do so either at the booth or contacting jefffl@namm.org. 100 percent of the proceeds generated from this auction will directly benefit local flood victims.

Musicians union AFM Local 257 will also host donations of products, instruments, and financial gifts at the show. If you’re elsewhere in the world, you can donate online at www.nashvillemusicians.org

Several sponsors are working on a “BIG Gear Giveback” program for the industry, culminating in a concert; see www.namm.org/wannaplaysunday

Finally, while I won’t be attending summer NAMM (I’ll be at home in New York), I know a number of things will be happening there that are relevant to CDM. If you’re attending or live in the Nashville area, get in touch.