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To all visitors: Kalvos & Damian is now a historical site reflecting nonpop from 1995-2005. No updates have been made since a special program in 2015. |
Chronicle of the NonPop Revolution
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We broadcast 537 shows, had a special 2006 summer show in New York, and now are K&D: In the House, a brand new iteration of the Kalvos & Damian! We are happy to be back!.
We ended our first series in September 2005 with Komposer Kombat, having begun in the spring of 1995. We soon took our experiment online. We had early audio online (RealAudio 1.0, yes indeed, long before mp3 rocked the web), and made history with K&D/Webproject online mentoring and the Amsterdramm transatlantic cyber/broadcast, and 2001's Ought-One Festival of NonPop. So we were happy to celebrate 537 shows that included tours to New York, New Jersey, California, Ontario, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and Germany.
Many thanks are offered to The Argosy Foundation as well as individual contributors for their continuing support of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar.
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At long last you can read as well as hear the K&D shows!.
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NonPop was invented by Kalvos & Damian as a meta genre to help retire the old categories of "new music" or "avant-garde" or "modern music" or "classical music" that had too much ugly baggage associated with them. Well doggone if it isn't catching on! The term has begun to pop up (or is that nonpop up?) in emails, on websites, and in other correspondence.
Even moreso, since we began The NonPop International Network, the word has begun to be heard with increasing frequency. Yes, we know it isn't accurate and has all sorts of flaws as a description. Jazz is certainly nonpop, but it has a well-wrought word known around the globe. Our own musical niche was suffering with its poor descriptive terms -- and a little bit from some of the music itself!
Do you object to "nonpop" as being negative? We have heard that complaint. The whole point of inventing the nonpop label was to de-ghettoize the new music, taking it away from the idea of it being classical or experimental or some such baggage-laden intellectual snobbery. And negative? Hardly! It's like, say, nonfiction or nonjudgmental or nondiscrimination or nonfat or nonstop. Tell the New York Times Best-Seller List it's being negative for having a "nonfiction" category!
So use "nonpop" when you get the opportunity. It feels real good!
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As we mentioned above, Kalvos & Damian recently celebrated 538 shows and is now back right here In the House! We're happy to be here -- and do so by request. Many composers were heard on the air the first time as K&D guests, and most of the K&D guest composers were heard on the net for the first time right here. We have played nearly 8,700 pieces of music and interviewed 275 guest composers (some still to be broadcast).
Kalvos & Damian welcomed our 1,584,148th visitor to this site today (at least since we started counting in April 1997). Though Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar contains nearly 1,500 web pages and over 11,000 separate files (17GB worth), visitors are only counted once (or when their browser cache is emptied). Our logs show an average of 90 'hits' per visitor. Work that out and you see we've had nearly 150 million hits on K&D! CNN may gather that much in a few days, but we're grateful to the more than 1.5 million of you who have visited us in the past nine years.
We also hope you'll tell others about us and especially about new nonpop. The best part of our work is knowing that people across the globe listen to new music streamed and archived here. Composers, publishers, and record labels have generously permitted us to maintain these archives -- so if you listen, also consider purchasing CDs of the music. We always identify the label and catalog number in out playlists. Sometimes you can't buy a recording (K&D plays lots of music on private recordings from the composers), but in that case, a friendly email to us or them would be welcome.
And don't forget to contribute electronically to Kalvos & Damian right now using PayPal or go to our funding page and send us a check. Thank you!
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Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is different music radio. K&D has taken on a task no one else had dared to do until very recently -- to present NonPop and its composers as a normal state of life's affairs, challenge and entertainment and funkiness and all: Music that is cool or cold or hot, composers who speak eloquently or trip over their own thinking, people who are quirky or sparkling or dull and whose music ranges from sonic big-eyed-kids-n-clowns-on-black-velvet through the Ockeghems of our time. Composers who are alive & live or unedited live-on-tape, with no second chances or politically correct rewrites. No cream of an afternoon's interview skimmed for satellite, but just the tumbling forward -- or the uncomfortable pauses -- of an afternoon visit.
In the process, we often embarrass the NonPop community.You won't see us mentioned in print very often (save for local press and the ever-perceptive duo of Kyle Gann at the Village Voice and Matt Mirapaul at the New York Times), despite having an audio archive of interviews that would take thirty 40-hour weeks to hear. That's because we have opinions, hate fakery, love credibility, and don't mind if composers weave a verbal rope for their own hanging. We also do the unthinkable in 'classical' music. We mix. We multitrack. We interrupt, dovetail, cut off, laugh, sneer, enthuse, or hoot.. We don't justify with pop similes or Mozartean parallels. And it doesn't matter if the composer is already famous, or we help in the discovery. The music just better not suck.
Sometimes it's stupid, sometimes we're stupid, because we play on the same field as our guests. We're composers, but that's not what we mean by playing on the same field. We don't script the show, nor prepare questions in advance, so no one knows what's coming next, not us, not the guest. Our guest composers are welcome to show us up as louts or compadres. Yes, we prepare material carefully for each show, but we also improvise it on a theme, a Glass Bead Game of 120 minutes length. It's a soirée or a matinée or just a kick-back in the locker room.
We also have personal standards that make our show unexpected -- despite doing an AM radio-style version of the show in February 2003. We know what we like, sure, but we'll play anything that's well made or interesting or even dull if there's a story to tell. K&D won't let you down, even if it makes you angry or stunned or shuffle-footed red-faced at our awkwardness, makes vanity labels livid, or makes a composer (or two or three) head back for the manuscript paper (or to the showers).
Ultimately, you'll hear music available nowhere else, and hear from the composers themselves.
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We at Kalvos & Damian live in the serene hills of Vermont, far from the events that we watched with disbelief over two years ago. We became artistically paralyzed. We lost significance. We searched for a way to speak, but as individual artists, could find none. So instead, we put out a call for music, and the results are found on The September 11 Musical Gallery. This gallery was open to new contributions until March 11, 2002, and will stay up as long as K&D does. Please visit for an insight into how composers and sound artists overcame their 9/11 paralysis.
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Kalvos & Damian is a broadcast/cybercast of new music and interviews, with audio archives, essays, presentations, and composer resources. We host guests and play interesting new music. But our goal is to do more than just entertain ... we provide musical and personal insight from our many guest composers and even ourselves. Two host composers, Dennis Báthory-Kitsz and David Gunn, provide extensive on-line support for research into the latest compositions and ideas, work with educational groups to provide on-line mentoring for students with important composers from around the world, and keep a good sense of humor.
Previous newsletters provided a list of site features in this section. We've changed our navigation, so now browse our site using the 2003 site design & navigation, or you can look at the site map for a few hidden bits. Read our funding reports:
These detail our projects and budget in the past. In the meantime, please help support us.
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Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar established its Board of Advisors in September 1998. The Board -- all of them composers -- provides assistance and suggestions in matters of funding, publicity, and distribution, offers suggestions on composers to interview and cities to visit for interviews, and helps with problems. Our board consists of composers and active listeners to new music.
Board of Advisors
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Our thanks to the contributors to and regular supporters of K&D.
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar did not benefit from the economy of IPO's and on-line trading, and is taking a harder hit now with the economic collapse. Our fiscal agent is the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, a 501(c)3 organization, so gifts to K&D are tax-deductible to the extent allowed. We are not presently funded by government or corporate grants, and only private contributions and The Argosy Foundation let the program continue, along with facilities generously provided by WGDR-FM. You are invited to read our Financial Reports to Contributors from 2002, 2001, 2000, 1998 and 1999 supplement (PDF documents).
Please offer your support. For more information, contact us by email, just write out your check to "Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar" and send it to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA, or send a micro- or macro-payment via PayPal. Gifts of equipment and supplies -- as well as help with research and maintenance, and additional software or music database system (we do this site by hand right now) -- are also welcome.
Another excellent way of supporting K&D indirectly is to use the services offered by our sponsors pair Networks of Pittsburgh or services offered by the show's hosts, David Gunn and Dennis Báthory-Kitsz: We accept commissions for music, do audio recording, mastering, and restoration, provide writing and editing via The Transitive Empire,. Oh, yes -- David's CD, Somewhere East of Topeka is available from Albary Records!
News for Guest Composers |
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Our new schedule is open now that we are literally doing K&D: In the House! in the house -- Kalvos's house, actually.
If you would like to come back as a guest on Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, we'd love to have you on the show. The ideal way for us is to come to Vermont, put your feet up on the table, and talk. We set up the living room as a studio, and have a great time. The less-than-ideal way is for us to interview you by telephone. Read this: We don't have a satellite studio. So we will record our end, you will record your end, and we will mix them together when you send us a CD of your end. That way there's no "phone sound" and it feels as live as can be over how ever many thousands of miles we may be apart.
An odd thing: Not all our guests know how K&D works, even after they ask to be on the show. We have fun, we zone out on academia, and we let guests, um, talk themselves into a corner. So for a chuckle on what not to do if you come to K&D, read Kalvos's real-life chronicle, How Not to Prepare for a K&D Guest Appearance, where names have been changed to protect the innocent.
To be a guest, please contact us by email, phone, or post -- and find out about our show and site first! that includes the critical music archiving release found below.
The following information is in the process of being updated. With over 1,700 pages of text, it's just a bucketload of work to come back to after nearly three years away!
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We repeat this message in every newsletter, so bear with us -- most of the content is the same, but some important changes pop up every time. It is so important that now it has a special section, so please click here and read carefully!
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Most of you have stopped using your K&D web pages, moving to your own personal web pages. However, our site still comes up first in most web searches for new music, and major publications stop by K&D first. So don't forget to send material!
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Our pages come up at the top of searchers, so fresh information is important -- including where you've moved. We try to update pages (yes, we know, mea culpa). You can send us your text as an email, and you can send us photos and music clips as email attachments -- or through postal mail. For any submissions it's best to use our FTP directory at ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/
Note: Because our site is an archive site, everything you submit stays posted (except for legal problems not anticipated by K&D or the composer!). We will (rarely) unlink some items (such as older photos), and we usually just comment out old bios in the source code. But you are who you are, and as K&D guests, you realize that you appeared on our show unedited and uncensored. That's always been our philosophy -- though most of you know that, a few composers thought our pages were promotional replacements for an agent. Can't imagine why!
We can use brief video clips on your pages now. Some of what we use is listed below. Note: Contact us if you use FTP so we can retrieve the files!
If we haven't yet updated your page, please remind us. Updates were slow especially last year as Kalvos completed his We Are All Mozart project, and its associated premieres.
If you send us computer media, you may send us CDs or DVDs only, no more diskettes or Zip disks or CDs. We can still read them, but it means dragging computer carcasses out of the closet. If emailing or FTPing files, Mac users be sure to use file extensions and save as cross-platform files.
Good preparation helps all around:
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We look forward to our guest composers' creation of 10-second K&D station IDs. We now have 45 very kewl spots. We love these IDs! Please do a few for us!
The ID would consist of your greeting, such as...
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Record the message in your native language (or any other language, if you like!), and using whatever audio techniques or special effects you'd like. You can mail us a recording to 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA, FTP us an uncompressed or .mp3 file via binary transfer to ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/ or email us a .mp3 file (please don't email uncompressed files) to our email address.
We would love it if every guest recorded a station ID for us! Many thanks -- we've been having great fun with this.
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We would broadcast more of your audio art -- essay, collage, composition, or other unique use of the audio medium -- if we could get it! Come on, just about anything creative you'd like to send in -- up to about 15 minutes in length -- will be featured, and also added to your web page. For audio art, we would appreciate the material on CD-R, DAT or MiniDisc, but for this project, high-quality cassettes or MP3s can also be used.
We also will accept documentary content. 10 minutes is a good length.
First read our recordings submission guidelines, then send material to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA or upload it to our FTP site at ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/.
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With our new server from pair Networks, we have breathing room. Some of you have made musical scripts or applets to run over the Web, and we would be pleased to have them served from the K&D site, or we can link to your existing applet. So if you have Javascript or Java applets that would delight visitors, send them along ... we can't include cgi or applications that need to be run using server features, but other items are welcome for us to try.
Email your applet or link, with instructions (and a demo, if necessary) to add to your web page, to us via our contact form, or use our FTP site via ASCII (for scripts) or binary (for compiled applets) transfer to ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/ site. Source code is welcome for posting if you'd like to share it.
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The commentaries and essays on the K&D pages are many and varied, and generate considerable public response. Send along some of your writings and we'll attach them to your web page suite -- and make sure they're found by searchers. One essay received over 900 visits one week, apparently the result of a university assignment; the composer was pleased.
Email a text copy (read the guidelines) to us via our contact form, and include any illustrations, diagrams, etc., in JPEG, TIFF or GIF format. You can also FTP (ftp://maltedmedia.com/incoming/) the materials using ASCII transfer. If you have no electronic version of the goodies, mail a crisp copy on white paper to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA -- we'll convert them and get them posted when we have time.
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We have limited air time and budget, so choices are made for our convenience; we hope you can understand. The two composer/hosts Kalvos and Damian choose the music, write the commentaries, conduct the interviews, edit the tapes, do our own engineering right down to WGDR's transmitter logs, prepare post-show RealAudio and MP3 conversions and perform website maintenance.
So we've set up guidelines. Selections most likely to be played are great compositions (...had to say that!...), under 15 minutes in length, and recorded on a clearly indexed medium, including CD, CD-R, Minidisc, and vinyl, and very rarely, on DAT. We understand that it's too much to ask that every composer make copies of music on CD, but all other issues being equal, keep in mind that we'll grab a CD before any other format. Remember, we love to play stuff. So please follow these format guidelines to keep us enthused!
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Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar is costly for us. Unlike other organizations, we do not ask that our composer guests be "members" or pay for their web pages. But we do need support, and several composers and fans of new music have been very generous. We thank them again here. K&D's fiscal agent is the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, a 501(c)3 organization, and gifts to K&D are tax-deductible in USA to the extent allowed.
We are not presently funded by government or corporate grants, and only private contributions and an unexpected gift from The Argosy Foundation let the program continue, along with facilities generously provided by WGDR-FM, Goddard College, and our own Malted/Media.
Please offer any support you can. For more information, contact us by email, or just write out your check to "Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar" and send it to us at 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA. Gifts of DATs, blank CD-Rs, Zip disks, some nice headphones, and other supplies -- as well as help with research and maintenance, and keeping your own K&D page fresh -- are also welcome.
