IMAGE: Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under

This is FoF’s Middle Earth correspondent with the latest dispatch from Wellington, New Zealand.

Amanda Palmer (formerly of the Dresden Dolls) and partner-in-crime Jason Webley are taking the capital by storm this weekend, with concerts and an appearance at Webstock, a conference for internet experts. Palmer spoke at Webstock about how she wants to use the internet as a tool for democratization, specifically for cutting out the middleman of the record industry and connecting artist and audience more directly.

One of the ways she’s been doing this is by throwing “ninja gigs”, free all-ages acoustic performances whose time and location she posts on her Twitter feed about 24 hours ahead of time. Ninja gigs offer the twofold benefits of entertaining her underage fans who may not be able to attend her shows in 18+ venues, and also giving out “free samples” of her work (as Dave Awl put it) to those who don’t know it yet or who are undecided about buying tickets to her shows later in the week.  Palmer and Webley wowed the crowd at Civic Square last night with just ukelele, guitar, accordion and their unamplified voices: photos of the event here.

Clearly Palmer’s also drawing on her background in street theatre and performance art.  It’d be interesting to see her fellow chanteuse/performance artist Lady Gaga doing something like this, but she has such high production values it’d take ages to cordon off and set up.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2011 at 7:41 pm and is filed under Images, Music, People, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.