Matthew Chaim
Wow.
I can’t quite believe it.
One whole year has come and gone, and our baby Songcamp has done her first full spin around the sun.
In some ways it feels like it's been insanely longer — like decades have happened in the span of months. I often feel like Songcamp was born in 1988. It’s of that era for real.
In other ways, it’s been an absolute flash. Like 15 minutes ago I spun up a lil discord called Songcamp, blinked, and suddenly we’re all here, doing our thing — running experiments at the edges of music and web3 like it’s nobody’s business.
We have been showing up to the Squad Phone on the Songcamp discord server every single Monday for 52 weeks straight. No small feat if you ask me. The Monday Heartbeat has become an absolute institution in our little corner of the Internet, and I love it so much.
In the span of that time, we’ve run Camp Genesis, Camp Elektra, and just two weeks ago kicked off our third camp in Camp Chaos. Hundreds of artists have come into Songcamp and found a space to be curious together, explore in this open-minded way, asking the question “what does this new internet really make possible for us”? And with these first three camps, we’ve taken a cumulative 132 artists, devs and operators on the deepest experiential journeys toward answering that question.
But that ain’t it. Not in the least. Even outside our full camp cohorts, we’ve given birth to multiple minicamps (both URL and IRL), co-created a music NFT discord bot called BPM, organically incubated experiments in our Camp Labs division such as the Camp Counselors program and Floppy, and surfaced plenty of other organic experiments + friendships galore.
Suffice it to say, it’s been a ride.
But we’re just getting started.
Camp Chaos just opened a couple weeks ago, and it is easily our biggest experiment yet. Moreover, the plans we’ve got cooking for the rest of this year and beyond are just… I get emotional typing it out.
But before we jump to what’s ahead, let us look back fondly. Let us literally cry tears of nostalgic joy. Songcamp heavyweights Jackintheway, Peace Node, Will Juergens and iara ❀ bloomz have put together an incredible collection of artifacts for our Heartbeat 52 celebrations, including this exceptional video of the people of Songcamp. Let’s watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7nH1gW15gw
I know. Too good. I am crying.
Above all else, it is the people who’ve converged here and the relationships that have formed between us that’s so mind blowingly special.
We wanted to highlight that even more, so for our Heartbeat 52 Call we put together a lil presentation of the Heartbeat 52 Awards — honoring those who’ve given life week in and week out to the very anchor + rhythm of our Songcamp community — the Monday Heartbeat.
And here they are:
Love + love. What a crew for real.
Beautiful stuff like this gives rise to some pretty exciting questions.
Questions that stir within me a sense of awe and wonder. A feeling of pure possibility.
Questions like…
What will Heartbeat 100 be like? What will Heartbeat 1000 be like?
What will Camp 4 be like? *What about Camp 18? 27? 96??
The possibilities are truly endless. For when you crash creative people into one another, the well of potential that springs forth is absolutely limitless.
What we are recognizing more and more at Songcamp, is that this process happens naturally when we design functional containers. By containers I refer to the ambient definition we give to space and time, to our communal coordination and communication, such that we collectively point ourselves to creative outlets that can converge in interesting ways. This allows us to think up outlandish hypotheses and then go and run an experiment in artmaking, worldbuilding, and nft-making that attempts to answer it.
And with each camp, Heartbeat call, minicamp, and Camp Labs project, we get better and better at building these containers. We keep improving at the design and implementation of containers — so that thousands, nay, millions of artists can collectively explore their creative dreams and realize value for doing so. I want to thank you all so much from the deepest parts of my being for making this a truly life-changing year — for me as well as so many of us at Songcamp. It has been like nothing I could have ever imagined. Here’s to the next 100 years..
HAPPY BIRTHDAY SONGCAMP!!!!!! 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
