Minutes of THiNGS meetings (1 Viewer)

[Unclealo]

Minutes of THiNGS meeting Monday 6th January 2003

Present: meself, Ro, Billy, Egg, Helen, Shorty, PSSC.

Following was discussed/decided

Things tour:
Lorcanzo couldn't make it, but he has a plan to present, with provisional line-ups and venues.
Helen and Treelo are going to work on the publicity for the whole shebang.

We will hold at least two Dublin nights purely for showcasing provincial Things associated bands such as Aurel, Blind Eye View, Yakuza, The Evangelists, Weevil, Giveamanakick etc. We decided that these should probably be in the Firestone/Toners/Doyles (TBC)

Before approaching the venues we need to run through the plan so we decided to have a meeting this Saturday. The following people HAVE to be there: me, Lorcanzo, Helen, Treelo. Anyone else is welcome to come.

Zine
Billy is also holding a zine meeting on Saturday. He has the details I believe.

Distro
Need to have a distro meeting next Monday. We need to sort out the proceedure for getting stuff into Dublin shops. We have alot of CD's waiting to get into Road etc. (Aurel, BEV etc.) The following need to be there: me, Ro, Treelo, Hopper. Anyone welcome. 7.30 Lord Edward Monday the 13th.

 

[Unclealo]

Minutes of THiNGS meeting Monday 13th January 2003

Last night quietest meeting ever: Me, Lorcanzo, Ro, Michaelknight, PSSC, Shorty.

Tour
Lorcanzo showed his tour plan. The man has done some sterling work having talked to most of the venues/ contacts already.
Next up a meeting is needed to sort out P.R. and final bookings etc. Treelo and Helen need to come to this. We need to arrange this for next week.

..and that was about. The Minister for the Arts was sitting across the way passing around brown envelopes

 

[Unclealo]

Minutes of THiNGS meeting Monday 10th February 2003

Zine: T'was previewed and last minute changes made. should be ready BOR #11.

Distro: Ro (Mumblin' Deaf) is contact for distro for Things into Road/ Freebird and Tower. Individual bands will have to approach him.

Not much can be done provincially for the mo. Eoghan Evangelists has offered to put stuff into Letterkenny. Nothing has sold in Cork. Nothing has even made it into the shops in Limerick or Galway. I am to chase these up this week. I am also going to ask Eamonn and Ronan for a 'report' on how things are selling up North.
Tim O'D (NeoSuper) suggested approaching a certain independent national distributor to handle the problematic provincial areas.

Tour: All venues confirmed except Cork/Dublin. Helen to start arranging PR.

Compilation: Me to start doing it...

Businsess Stuff: Billy to meet lawyer

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes of THiNGS meeting Tuesday 25th February 2003

lorcanzo talked aboot the tour (doing alot o good work here) and we discussed what do do as regards covering expenses by pooling any money made on each night to be redistributed at the end of the whole thing. (i think).

zine stuff should have been sent to egg_ by now and so hopefully the new skin on the website should be live soon. i also asked if copies of both zines could be brought along to tour gigs.

ro doing dublin distro wants to get a procedure in place for how to handle requests to take stuff on the stall/distro as regards quality of physical and audio production. we discussed setting up a listening committee with rotating members. no final decision made here.

the gals from playground psycho offered their services and those of their mates for making a documentary on the scene. treelo and conor are to get the current documentary on its feet again and may enlist these guys help if needed.

ian has arranged to get 2 of each cd into each of the 3 music city stores in rathmines, dun laogharie and bray. so he's basically looking for 6 of each cd - he will ask hopper about this. there will be a things stand in each store and a listening post in one of the stores.

billy made the case for setting up a co-op. the main concern was that in order to maintain it there would need to be one person working on it full time and where would the money to pay them come from beyond grants.

helen and someone else stressed that we need to get posters etc. up in the towns that the gigs are going to be in asap. plenty o good work being done on the promotion side - loadsa future interviews and stuff and press releases being prepared.

i'm sure there's other stuff so i'll let someone else add...

 

[silo]

Minutes of THiNGS meeting Monday 24th March 2003

14 in attendance. 13 boys, 1 gerril.

kieran (lorcanzo) talked about the tour. then we gave him a round of applause. well done kieran.

cormac (egg_) regaled us with tales of teething troubles with the thingsyouremissing discount for gzcd/sony.

i asked if we should do a bit of a change to the site; add in a 'tour' tab in the navbar for, eh, tour stuff.

plans for getting the stall up and down the country (in order to be able to have it at all the tour dates) were hatched.

mumblin' deaf ro got the ball 'ro'-lling (arf!) in the 'what is things/who's in and who's out' on the distro debate.

discussion on joining the fmc - most in favour. this will entail finalising a TYM committee.

There was also suggestions of Doing a Phantom add for the Things Dublin date and using an overall profit from the tour to do a Things compilation.

 

[Knacker]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 7th April 2003

Lots of people in attendance. Couldn't really list off who was there..... but there were plenty of people (reckon about 20 - in population terms it was an Irish lot as opposed to a Chinese lot).

Stuff that came up:
Kieran regaled us with tales from the tour. An epic journey by all accounts, which were also discussed. Posters will need to be put up in Waterford right now and posters will need to be printed and put up around Dublin.

The distribution was also discussed for some time. It's still in it's infancy so there are the perennial teething problems. We have some definite, "no-bother-te-ye-boss" cities... and some ones which are a bit flakey. We'll have to get something much more solid set up in Cork and Limerick. However I think it was generally agreed that the tour has been a massive help to this.

Apparently the boys and girls in Belfast are up for a regular Things You're Missing night, as is the boy in Galway. This is ace-cellent by all accounts.....

The suggestion to sell records through the things site was also mentioned. Perhaps a link-up with Road Records, which stocks everything anyway, could be set up....

Tom Doherty (aka silo) came along with some documentation from the FMC (the Federation of Music Collectives). A discussion followed about joining this... now, this is me personally speaking here, but I think people were generally in favour. A decision was made to invite Angela Dorgan to the next Things meeting and a final decision will be made then. I assume there's going to be a lot of discussion about this on the threads.
I've really wanted to say this all morning... but I don't think Things should have a silo mentality.... oh dear, oh dear... that's a terrible joke


Ian said that there will now be a Things You're Missing section in all three Music City outlets (they're in Bray, Dun Laoghaire and Rathmines). The section will carry the Things logo on the plasticy bit that separates the cds...They also run in-store gigs, so perhaps a band or two or nine could play there sometime.

Mary from Playground Psychotic said that she has a friend who works for IMRO. She suggested she could bring her along to a meeting to go through the ins and outs of joining IMRO.

I mentioned that there should hopefully be a regular Things You're Missing article or articles in Foggy Notions...

And an idea for a compilation cd was put forward....

egg - ... and the compilation CD was pretty much agreed on - it's to be primarily a promotional rather than a for-sale thing, with hi-res images and info on the acts as well as music. Joss is going to take responsibility for it so it looks like it might actually get done!

 

[Knacker]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 28th April 2003

Okay... it was a pretty informal affair last night. Decent enough crowd. Don't ask me who was in attendance though, but I can say some folk were there who haven't been before.

(silo: 18 people in attendance, most of the time. 12 boyz, 6 gerrils, or 2:1, if you remember junior cert maths.)

Angela Dorgan from the FMC came along and told us about what she does. I think everyone felt quite positive about it. One point: Things, as a member of the FMC, would only have access to the FMC's quite considerable instrument library if they are doing Outreach or educational programmes - bands can't borrow the instruments for recording, gigging or whatever else those crazy musicians do with their instruments.
It struck me that there was a very positive reaction to the FMC and I recommend we join up in July when they are accepting new members. It won't cost anybody any money.

Kieran thanked everyone who helped out with the Things You're Missing tour. A profit of €4 was made! Plans for another tour were also mooted.

I put forward my idea for a co-operative for specific labels. I will be arranging a meeting of minds on this. There's quite a bit of interest already and I will be in touch with various folk over the next week to arrange a get together.

Thomas Dunning also told us about the collective in Chicago that he is involved with. So go to Google and look around for a collective in Chicago called CHAT. It seems very interesting.

I also mentioned that I've been in touch with the People's Republic of Cork and another person down there about getting some more concrete contacts in Ireland's first city.

 

[Knacker]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 12th May 2003

There was five of us there last night (I think). As per usual, once there's a smaller number, you think you've been more productive!

Stuff that was put forward:
Gigs/tours
It's been suggested that there'd be one weekend in September where there would be similutaneous gigs in Belfast, Galway and Dublin (and possibly Cork). That could work well.
Kieran is also planning on putting together a few "Things You're Missing" gigs at some stage soon. They'd be smaller affairs.
And there's also the idea of a Things Sabbath-style event. They may not all work out like that, but there ideas in the melting pot.

CHAT
Mary and myself and those who want to be involved are going to put together a list of people involved with Things You're Missing. This could develop into a contact network of folk involved with independent music in Ireland. I'll elaborate more in Thomas (aka Stunning)'s thread about the Chicago network, CHAT.

(from CHAT thread:
This really is an interesting site and I believe that it should be given serious consideration by Things. Although this is just a list of contacts, it's also a network. So, say if someone wants to start up a club or something, they will be able to find contacts for bands very easily, and vice versa. I know networks seem like airy-fairy bullshit to most people, but they're dead handy. A list needs to be made of folk involved with the independent music scene. A Dublin CHAT if you will. I know there's the Hot Press Yearbook, but that has a lot of useless crap and toadying biogs of music industry tits. But if people put forward contact details for people they've used for various stuff in the past then it'd be more applicable for bands etc. It could be listed as such: Name, Contact Details, What they do, Recommended By. This isn't a definite version or anything (afterall this is just an internerd message board). I'm not sure if this list of contacts should be openly available to all-comers. That's to be decided. It could work that it's available to people who join Things You're Missing. This would be very much in the same vein as http://www.tsjok.com - although not as elitist. This is really an underlying network for sharing information on bread-and-butter stuff like printing out CDs, contacts for venues, stuff like that. Not sure how the band contacts would work... but maybe a description from the band of what their music is like would be helpful. Mary and myself will be able to put together this list... anyone else who wants to help out just drop me a line. It's not that complicated.. all you need is foolscap and a pen to actually compile it. )

FMC
It was asked what the benefit of joining the FMC if people can't use the instrument library for personal use. However, there's no reason to stay out of it, so it looks like we will join up in July (that's when they're accepting new applications). I hope to arrange a seminar-type thing with the FMC at some stage in the summer. It will be on collaboration and working collectively. I would prefer it that the person who gets the job as project co-ordinator in the FMC will be putting this together.

London gig night
Going to throw this in although it wasn't brought up in the meeting.
I was chatting to Daragh Keogh (of NPB) on Sunday about this and that. Daragh is looking into setting up a regular monthly club in a venue in North London. This would feature Irish acts... something like the Ballroom I guess. Get a bit of a buzz in London about Ireland and all that. It'd be also something bands here can rely on over there.

 

[egg_]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 26th May 2003

Zine
We talked about the zine a bit, both as a thing itself and as a stimulus for people to write articles that could go on the site
We need an editor though, someone to take responsibility for the thing - nlgbbblbth can't do it anymore.

Distro
In other news I'm still pushing the distribution people to start using the stock tracker more (the offer of a training session still stands) so we can make the new distro page (where you can search for records and see where they're stocked ... see http://www.thingsyouremissing.com/stock_tracker/php/user_system.php) live

Electro TYM Tour
What else? Hmm ... one or two people talked about the desirability of organising a tour for the electronic acts. No decisions made, just a general consensus that it would probably be A Good Thing

Stall
We also could do with a couple of other volunteers to man stalls on a regular basis, to ease Richie and Donnchadh's burdens ... sales via the stall one of the most beneficial features of things for any act involved

Contacts info for website
Oh yeah, Mary says her and Billy are going to collect information on useful contacts for things acts ... sort of based on the CHAT website. As soon as they have (some of) the information gathered I can figure out how to display it on the site.
To be honest though I'm not sure contact information for people like Leagues etc should be made public on the site ... it's nearly as handy, if you want to get in touch with someone, just to ask on thumped

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 9th June 2003

From the mouth of michaelknight:

Present - moi, Lorcanzo, Snakybus, Juno, Pyscho 2, Herv, Herv's mate Dave, lmd64, Stunning, Claire, Treelo, Silo, a couple of other folk.

Tour
Lorcanzo outlined his plans for a tour August/September, which will be bigger/better etc...was thinking of finishing in Dublin with three gigs, possibly distinguished by genre, or themed in some way or other, or summit...he wants to have someone (probably from one of the bands on the night) in charge of each gig, basically so he can sit on his arse etc...

Rant - decision making
he then went on an enormous rant about how we need to get stuff moving more in Things...I opined that we need to get people assigned to tasks more definitely, so that one/two people are in a position to make decisions on things, instead of having a thread with loads of opinions on something that never concludes definitively...

Compilation
With this in mind, lmd64 has offered to take charge of the compilation yolky, possibly in conjunction with Old, so he's going to go around to those on the stall and see who's interested...

Stall
the stall is in a transitional period at the mo, Donnchadh's in the process of handing over the admin to me; once that's out of the way we need to look at inaugurating some sort of a floating stall that can be transferred from person to person with as much ease as possible...we'd probably need some central location to leave it...the Blackfort Gallery was mooted?

Listings
mebbe in the listings email we should mention whatever other Things stuff we need to promote (i.e. tour, and possibly other things).

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 7th July 2003

From the mouth of Juno:

Present were: Cormac, Liam, Kieran, Richie, Helen and myself (Juno)

Tour Kieran started by talking about the tour and how it would be organised. I think most of this is on the tour thread.

Compilation Then Liam showed us his suggestions for the compilation and we talked about the criteria for choosing tracks, whether to use CDs/CD-Rs, pricing etc. Again, I'll leave it to Liam to fill in the details when he has them finalised.

Distro The stock tracking system is pretty much go (big yay to Cormac for that!) so that'll make all things stall and distro related a lot easier.

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes of Things Meeting Monday 21st July 2003

From the mouth of silo and egg_:

there: tom (silo), cormac (egg_), ronan (mumblin' deaf ro), liam (lmd64) and, much later on, puffing for breath, allen (unclealo). boy = 5. girl = 0.

discussed: the compilation, predominantely. the zine, briefly. the provincial distro, which turned into a talk about the possibility of getting professional promotion, but that's just an idea.

Compilation
- The compilation is a stall sampler.
- Liam will contact everyone on the stall and ask if they want to submit a track.
- If there are more interested acts than space on a single CD, we'll decide then how to narrow it down
- The CD will be a pressed CD, not a CD-R
- Basic information on the acts (name, website, contact details, broad description of the music) will be printed on the inlay card
- Promo copies of the CD will be sent to a list of people who we hope will promote the music on it. All other copies of the CD will be available on the stall, where we will give them away with sales AND give them for FREE, but expect to get a donation in return

The last point needs a little bit of explanation. Tom felt (and I tend to agree) that to give free copies to journalists and the like while charging normal punters for a copy isn't right-and-proper, and that we should either charge both or give free copies away to both. However we all agreed that it is impractical to charge people like John Kelly and Leagues for a copy, and to give away copies to punters would mean we risked people taking the CD because it's free rather than because they're interested. So we decided that, seeing as we're giving the CD to media types without demanding payment, but expecting that they will pay us in kind by giving us media exposure, likewise we should give the CD to punters also without demanding payment but expecting that they will pay us 2 euro.
I know a lot of people are gonna go "what's the difference?" and a lot of people are gonna go "oh you're so idealistic" but fuckit, I'm an idealistic fella and I think it's an elegant solution to a real dilemma - one of the things I love most about THings is that we can make our own rules and don't have to sacrifice ethical consistency if we don't want to. Also, for the hardhead commercialists among us, I'd imagine that our policy on this stuff, being novel, gives journalists an 'angle' when writing about us and so might work in our favour as far as getting publicity goes

Tour
Kieran wasn't there, but it seems that he has got a new job and as a result isn't able to spend as much time on this as he thought he would. As a result, the autumn tour is in doubt

Provincial distribution
Well, it seems our experiment in provincial distribution in the Republic has been largely a failure.
Limerick: Ivan has sold a handful records on an AMC stall, but hasn't put any records into any shops
Galway: there are some records in a shop, and Gugai has had them on his stall, but it's proving very difficult to find out if we have sold any (which we probably haven't)
Cork: records are in Plugd, but we have sold nothing
The north is kind of a different story, cos of the untiring work of Yakuza and The Evangelists.

So we conclude - unless we have a very active person in a town (or far better publicity), we won't sell anything, and we're wasting our time.

Where to now? Allen thought that perhaps we should talk to Gael-Linn or some other Irish distributor about taking on some or all of the things catalogue. We simply don't have the resources to do the distribution ourselves. BUT, as we have learned, we won't sell a damn thing unless the music is publicised, and again we don't have the resources to do publicity ourselves - really, we're all music-makers, not marketers, and we don't have the time or the skills or the interest in this shit. So, we talked for a little while about getting interested bands/labels together to pay a publicity person to do this shit for us. (see other threads)

 

[taubstumm]

TYM 29th Sept: minutes

(i left early, please fill in stuff i've missed)
(probably merge this into the 'minutes' thread tomorrow)

there: ronan (mumblin' deaf ro), liam (lmd64), tom (tom.), cormac (egg_), declan (cookiemonster), helen (lily), mary (juno).

i think that's all. 5:2 m:f, some people wearing funny trousers and haircuts, all in the 20-30 age bracket (ish), looking shifty in the corner of the pub.

-----------------

zine: issue 3 nearing completion, articles on postering, recording, things radio, (hopefully) an interview, reviews, news, stall ad etc. some of remaining tour money will be used for photocopying. if anyone has cheap/free photocopying facilities and is feeling generous, pm me please.

compilation: tracks being submitted/organised now; if you said you were going to give something and you haven't, talk to liam lmd64. the plan is to hopefully have a free-with-any-stall-purchase/donation price on the compilation; contributing bands will be giving about 50 or 60 europes to cover costs.

distro/stall: some talking about distro/stall regarding records which already have distribution.

-----------------

also, now that it's september and everybody's back at school, you're all very welcome to start coming to meetings again too.

 

[taubstumm]

oh: preferences for next meeting: monday 13th or monday 20th?

 

[Lily]

Kieran suggested we start a monthly THiNGS gig which I think is a good idea and worth a try at least!

(i left early, please fill in stuff i've missed)
(probably merge this into the 'minutes' thread tomorrow)

there: ronan (mumblin' deaf ro), liam (lmd64), tom (tom.), cormac (egg_), declan (cookiemonster), helen (lily), mary (juno).

i think that's all. 5:2 m:f, some people wearing funny trousers and haircuts, all in the 20-30 age bracket (ish), looking shifty in the corner of the pub.

-----------------

zine: issue 3 nearing completion, articles on postering, recording, things radio, (hopefully) an interview, reviews, news, stall ad etc. some of remaining tour money will be used for photocopying. if anyone has cheap/free photocopying facilities and is feeling generous, pm me please.

compilation: tracks being submitted/organised now; if you said you were going to give something and you haven't, talk to liam lmd64. the plan is to hopefully have a free-with-any-stall-purchase/donation price on the compilation; contributing bands will be giving about 50 or 60 europes to cover costs.

distro/stall: some talking about distro/stall regarding records which already have distribution.

-----------------

also, now that it's september and everybody's back at school, you're all very welcome to start coming to meetings again too.

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes for thingsyouremissing meeting, Monday Jan 26th 2004:

From Cormac:

Present: me, Helen, Mick (aka some QPR player), Kieran, Richie, Ro, Allen, Billy, Declan, Liam, Mary

We decided to stop doing listings and news on the website, which means a bit of a site re-design. I'm going to forward the mailing list that we have collected to Billy, who is going to send out occasional listings and news regarding 'the scene' as he sees fit.

I'm going to start work on the equipment library idea. I'm gonna post a thread on the General board and send around a few PMs - first purchase (as soon as we get the money together) is gonna be a very high-class vocal mic (Neumann U87), cos I think that's something very few of us have access to that we could all benefit from.

We also talked about where we're going as an 'organisation'. Ro spoke eloquently , the main thrust of his argument being that the various people involved in tym have in the past caused themselves a lot of heartbreak trying to organise Big Projects, stuggling to get people involved and active and such ... as an alternative to this he suggested that TYM might be better suited to being a forum for people who are already planning to do something to co-operate with each other. For instance, rather than Kieran organising a tour for every band in the country, he might decide that Delorentos want to tour and then talk to other bands that are involved in tym that might want to tour with them. There seemed to be a loose consensus of agreement with this. We are going to continue with the resource website and the web radio and the stall and the distribution to the Dublin shops, because they already exist and they are sustaining themselves, but don't intend to start up any other projects that are as broad in the future. We agreed that the most pressing problem any of the bands/artists have is lack of publicity, so if we're going to try and crack a big nut that should be the one.

Oh, one other thing - the compilation is still going ahead, Liam is still collecting tracks, will keep us posted.

From Declan:
aswell as all that we decided to offer bands & studios etc cheap web space, as there is 2.5 gigs spare on the thingsradio server (plus another 1 gig for backups)
since most band websites have a few pages of text, some pictures & 4-5 mp3s, we can fit about another hundred extra sites there, and charge a nominal fee for it. the hosting company would probably give us a discount on registering all the domain names aswell.

the launch night for the radio yoke also came up, and helen and i met up yesterday to plan it in a bit more detail. more to follow on that soon - should have the date fixed before friday(either 20th or 21st feb). There was talk of doing an all day gig, not sure if the digital hub people would do that, but i'll ask anyways

 

[snap-apple]

Minutes for thingsyouremissing meeting, Monday March 23rd 2004

who there: me (conor), kieran (lorcanzo), declan (cookiemonster), cormac (egg), liam (lmd64) and helen.

thingsradio launch: can't be done in april as originally planned as it's proving hard to get one-off insurance cover for just one night. hopefully will do it in may or june. cormac thinks he knows a place that might do one-off insurance for conferences and the like so that might be suitable. helen and declan need people to provide a/v (projectors etc.) and backline (amps, drums etc.) equipment for the night. currently it looks like there'll be two stages. so far around 25 acts are pencilled in.

tym compilation: liam has collected all the tracks now and is looking at getting either 100 or 200 cdr's done with nessy at music matters international. once they're done liam will chase the acts up for the money to cover the production costs. the rough plan with this cdr compilation is that it will be available on the stall and used for promotion, not for general sale from shops. ro suggested placing it in student fresher packs in september/october.

tym mailout: billy mailed 'round to say he'll hopefully be sending out a fortnightly email each sunday summing up recent news and some selected gigs.