I had heard about House Concerts and Levon Helm‘s Midnight Rambles, but until I read this article, I had not stopped to think about how extraordinary they are. By making archives, events and registration available on the internet, communities are formed among people who may never have found each other before. It’s not just the fact we can search and find connections to our most esoteric and temporary interests, it’s the fact that those connecting points are usually maintained over a long period of time, waiting for us to discover them. Truly miraculous.

NY Times: Home Is Where the Fans Are by Will Hermes (via Cool News of the Day)

Professional musicians performing in home settings is not that unusual; http://www.houseconcerts.org is one source of listings for such events. But it’s rare for musicians to open their own homes to the public. (One notable exception is the composer La Monte Young, who lives and performs in a TriBeCa building in New York City known as the Dream House.)

But just as the Internet is changing how recorded music is sold, it is changing the way live music is presented. An enthusiastic posting on a well-trafficked blog can dispatch a crowd to a gig by a little-known group in a matter of hours. In this case, a select group of fans can be summoned to a semiprivate show by world-class musicians that neighbors down the road are barely aware of.