In the previous episode Owen Kelly looked at songs available through the Free Music Archive, Jamendo and Tribe of Noise. We traversed the geography of the musical commons. In this episode we dive into the historical cultural commons.
We listen to the very first episode of The Shadow, a radio series that ran for thirteen seasons from 1937 to 1954. For the first eighteen months a young Orson Welles played The Shadow, and allegedly added to the dramatic quality of the series by looking at the script for the first time when he read it live on air.
Listening to this episode takes us back to the cultural diet of American families sitting around a radio at peak listening hour. We can hear how their Saturday evening entertainment sounded, rather than reading about it. We can only do this because the copyright on these broadcasts has expired. This episode serves as an example of the cultural histories that we will miss out on if the corporate hold over intellectual property continues to increase.
Our cultural history is under attack. The Shadow Knows!

In this episode Owen Kelly looks at the range of musics currently available under a creative commons licence.
He looks at some artist-released music as well as songs available through the Free Music Archive, Jamendo and Tribe of Noise. We pass through a varied landscape that includes modern pop, country, Indian jazz, folk and North African music. There is more to this than meets the ear.
You will hear David Rovics, Samie Power, Kat Penkin, Solsar, Jon Worthy & the Bends, Radha Thomas, Shoemansky, Starmob, ...mmm and Lessazo. Mmm, indeed!

Stacco Troncoso co-founded Guerrilla Translation with his partner, Ann Marie Utratel, as a living project to ground P2P and Commons theories in real practices.
He talks with Owen Kelly about the work of the group, and the ways in which they see the structure of their group as a vital part of its practice. They have developed a model of governance that guides their practice while acting as an example that others might build upon.
This model has grown into the idea of DisCos - distributed coops that exist in the market place without adopting the values of the marketplace.

Sophie Hope recorded this episode in a café in a break from her ongoing picket. (See episode 37 for details of that.) As a result you will hear an interesting variety of background noises and conversations, and feel as though you have sat down at the next table.
You will overhear a conversation with Mike Neary, Emeritus Professor of sociology at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Lincoln, whose most recent work, Students as Producers, Zer0 Books have just published.
Sophie and Mike discuss the current academic strikes across England, the idea behind teach-outs, and the role of education in establishing a post-capitalist society.

As well as podcasting and making art, Sophie Hope lectures at University College, London. The academic staff there have gone on strike to demand that their employer begins negotiations in several related areas: pensions, pay grades, differing pay in terms of gender & race, workload, and the casualisation of the teaching staff.
In this episode she explains why the staff have gone on strike, what they hope to achieve, and the complications of withdrawing your labour when your labour concerns the production of knowledge rather than tangible goods.

Owen Kelly and Irma Sippola have begun two cultural projects in Kerala, south India, in partnership with an NGO called SISP.
In this episode Sophie Hope talks to Owen about the purpose of the projects, their possible long term outcomes, and the practicality of passing on coding skills to teenagers with little or no prior experience of using computers.

In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue talking to Russell Southwood about ideas arising from the 1985 book What a Way to Run a Railroad that he co-authored with Charles Landry, Dave Morley and Patrick Wright.
Chapter 7 of the book looks towards the future, and the discussion looks at the cultural, economic and political issues that linger on from the nineteen eighties; sometimes in almost unchanged forms.

On October 28, 2019, Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope attended a seminar in Newcastle in which every participant had to bring a memento from their community art practice. Sophie brought a copy of What a Way to Run a Railroad, a book published by Comedia in 1985.
This sparked a lengthy discussion which resulted in us talking to Russell Southwood, one of the authors of the book. In this episode we look at how the book came to get written, and what effects it had.