chilljam.com

Happy Birthday Chilljam! :: Blog Entry

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Happy Birthday to chilljam.com!

Over the course of this year, all of us have undergone huge life changes, from watching our militaries go to war overseas, to helping our children figure out the first months of life, to new jobs and changing industries as the economy collasped beneath our feet, to finding our way in a restructuring world. It’s amazing what happens in a year’s time in the life of just a couple of people.
This website documents our experiences over this time.

One year ago today, we decided to put together a website for the little project that we were already working on.
Each week, we would gather together at Neil’s house, play some music to blow off some steam and just hang out with friends. Sometimes, we’d record some of the jams for ourselves as keepsakes.

Neil wired up his attic in a way where we could easily record everything we played. We started keeping some of the material we liked and even put some of it together in collections that we referred to as “albums”. I still remember the first time Jeremy came to the session with a CD of what is now referred to as “Space Explorer”, the set of material that was collected before I’d actually come to play with the project on a regular basis. I remember listening through it and thinking how cool it was to capture that little piece of time on something that could be listened to over and over again.
It was fun and really fulfilling to be able to listen back on the work we’d done, but really wanted to compile it all together in one place so that it could be easily listened to whenever we wanted.

So, we put together a website where we could gather everything together and listen whenever we felt like it.

At first, we weren’t quite sure what we wanted to do with the site beyond this. We started posting a song here or there just for our own posterity. However, a couple of weeks later, we started working based on the idea that we should post consistently on a weekly basis to keep track of what we played from week to week. Since much of our work is improvised and just a pure emotional outpouring of how we feel from week to week, it started to represent a sort of musical diary of what we thought about or felt collectively as we lived our lives.

As time passed, it became apparent that we wanted to expand on the limited capabilities the original site offered. Life seems to be moving faster and faster than it used to and it’s difficult for us to even get the chance to visit a website. This is why about a month ago, we decided to redesign the website from the ground up. We wanted to make it easier to listen to the music through means other than just going to the website. So we introduced additional syndication feeds including podcasting so that people can automatically subscribe to listen, rather than have to remember to come back from week to week.

I have to say that’s it’s been a fantastic year and it feels great to listen through our work here and have this kind of documentation of what we’ve done and experienced.
Thank you so much to everyone who’s taken the time to listen to a song or watch a video. We understand that we live in a world where time is so limited. It’s often difficult to take the time to visit a website and listen through a song, we greatly appreciate all those who take the time spend those precious minutes to experience the material here.