Eric Wahlforss, breiPott, Berlin

Berlin could be the most important city for music of the current times. And yes, I'm including London, LA and New York, all of which I've had extended stays in the last 12 months. The amount and variety of activity going on here is overwhelming, from the Ableton headquarters to the Turkish pizza joint with two decks that come alive 4 nights a week.

I had a great coffee chat with one the more influential types on the scene, Eric Wahlforss. We discussed the current state of affairs and other gossip over coffee (which seriously kicks ass all over Berlin) and fresh mint tea. Eric is one of the founders of Sound Cloud and is yet another dude seriously on the ball. SC has had explosive growth in the year and they are currently handling 4,000 uploads per day (!)

We talked about the possibilities of using SC as a back end for ccM - meaning: they store the files we upload. There would be quite a few benefits to us, not the least of which would be a lot less maintenance, files that converted to many other formats and a rich API for doing all kinds of fun hacks. Of course he was interested in having a few 1,000 new accounts, many of which would convert to the 'pro' accounts which feature unlimited (or close-enough-to-unlimited) uploads.

He is very humble about it all, but it also turns out, as Forss, Eric is a musician of some credentials and deservedly so. He has had quite a career as an indie electronica musician. There is a ton of his music at his page on Sound Cloud, but the stand out album is Soul Hack. This is pretty great stuff, kind of a cross between Trifonic and Kaleidoscope.




For all the thousands of places to go and things to see, I made it point to visit breiPott, a hipster bar (I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory way) in a hipster neighborhood (now, it's derogatory) that specializes in playing only Creative Commons music and having several "download stations" where users can browse through gigabytes of CC music for copying (sorry the pictures didn't come out - no flash on the iPhone).

When you find the music you want, you just plug your USB stick into the wall and away you go.