Frequently Asked Questions

...or ones we hope you'll ask

• New! Picture tour of K&D!
• What is this place, anyway?
• Are Kalvos and Damian bogus?
• What will I find here?
• How can I be part of this?
• Where can I hear the Bazaar?
• How do I play your sound clips?
• How many kinds of sound players??
• Hey! I know that composer! How do I get in touch?
• Couldn't this site be, like, kewler?
• What's this ampersand thing everywhere?

• The Kalvos & Damian New Music Bazaar is a radio show and website bringing composers to the wider world through their music, interviews, pictures, photos, artwork, essays, biographies, attitudes, catalogs and ideas. The Bazaar was begun in 1995 solely to present the eclectic world of newly composed music in a try-it-you'll-like-it format, and to connect composers with each other and with audiences. The Bazaar is sponsored by grassroots organizations in our Vermont home -- WGDR-FM, the Consortium of Vermont Composers, the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Goddard College, and is produced by Malted/Media Productions -- but lives to hear music from around the world. Contributions to K&D, the VCME, WGDR and the Consortium are welcome, and contributions of monetary support, new recordings, and supplies (PC equipment, CDRs, DATs, etc.) to the VCME's tax-exempt Kalvos & Damian Program Fund are invited. Contact Contact Form for information on how you can help.

• Hey! These may be mythical guys alternately played by Dennis Báthory-Kitsz and David Gunn, but they're real flesh are both pretty darn good composers themselves.
• Dennis is the K&D webmaster as well as the founder of Malted/Media, and has created odd things like the performance piece Echo and Stoneworld/Grey, and has a CD you'll want to buy called Detritus of Mating and a cool MP3.com site. He's also got a very popular Erzébet the Vampire website. His past includes such events as the Delaware Valley Festival of the Avant-Garde.
• David is the mastermind behind Leisure Weasel World, and the author of short stories and a body of quasi-lit. The two composers have collaborated not only on musical goodies like the chamber opera Plasm over ocean, but also on two books, the moderately informative and vastly humorous The Middle-Aged Hiker and the sci-fi masterpie..., uh, minipiece novel The Karmora Papers. They are also co-directors of Il Gruppo Nuke Jitters, a contemporary music performance ensemble, and work as writers and editors for The Transitive Empire.

Photo by Stefan Hard

• Oh yeah. They each have favorite tunes. Here are Kalvos's and here are Damian's.

• You're invited to look around, especially at the individual composer pages. Start at the New Music Bazaar homepage itself, or the list of all the composers and performers who've been on the show. There's the greatest set of music resources for composers you'll find on the net, plus a doggone good list of what sites composers themselves have been creating. We're a radio show, so you can steal musical ideas from our extensive playlists, which are linked to an index of record company websites and email addresses where you can get the audio goodies -- and, best of all, you can listen to complete, two hour broadcasts. If you're in a playful mood, try the graffiti page, where about 200 anonymous buttons will take you to music, photos, commentary, essays, graphics, and other interesting artistic objects on the web (to which you're welcome to contribute). The Best of the Bazaar offers sound mixes and splices culled from our shows and worked into Damian's unique audio art objects, and you can read his introductory essays to the show or order show cassettes. Finally, since we're on the ground in beautiful rural Vermont, we give some space to our sponsors, the Vermont Composers Consortium, their clever newsletter Consorting, the talented Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, and Goddard College.

• Be a composer or composer/performer, and contact us. If we think you'll add an interesting dimension to our interview programs -- and if you have a doggone good sense of humor -- we'll ask you to join us on the Bazaar. Once you're part of the show, we'll build you a web page with sights and sounds and embarrassing photos, or we'll link to your existing page. You can reach us by email at Contact Form or by mail at Malted/Media, 176 Cox Brook Road, Northfield, Vermont 05663 USA. Naturally, you can also contact us to make your tax-deductible contribution to the show's production.

• The Bazaar is broadcast live every Saturday afternoon from 2:30 to 4:30 (1930 to 2130 GMT) on WGDR in Central Vermont on 91.1 FM and via our live cybercast.You can hear our complete archive here on KalvoNet. Check out our homepage for regular announcements as archived shows are posted. We can also be heard on WOMR 92.1 FM in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and other radio stations will also be carrying the Bazaar in the next year. We didn't get the cash for national distribution yet, but we're working again on the possibility for Y2K. We used to have a New Music Newsline, but didn't get any feedback, so it's gone now. If you're curous about what it was, here is the last Newsline.
• You can also find us in a number of places with several projects. Kalvos & Damian is accessible via kalvos.org, kalvos.com, kalvos.net, newmusicbazaar.com, newmusicbazaar.org, and www.goddard.edu/kalvos. Our projects are the Ought-One Festival of NonPop 2001 at ought-one.com, and the ZipThree NonPop 2003 at zipthree.com. Coming up soon are nonpopradio.com and nonpoptv.com.

• You need a sound viewer or browser plugin. New versions of the more popular browsers already come with plugins for RealAudio and TrueSpeech, but you can also get them from our site -- plus a very nice Windows player for the Xing MPEG-2 audio clips and a Winamp player for MP3s. Find some of them all on our viewers page, which we keep updated as much as possible. All our Internetcasts, by the way, are done in RealAudio 5 mono now, which is pretty darn good fidelity for real-time sound streaming. Note: We're moving toward doing everything in RealAudio because their sound quality has continued to improve, but try not to be 'cutting edge' and cut out listeners! Attention WebTV users: WebTV and its owner Microsoft have finally decided to support the latest versions of RealAudio. Please read this story. Contact your ISP and make sure they keep up with audio upgrades!

• Four or five. Maybe six. And don't forget we have MIDI files, too, and links to bunches more, such as these. Things are always changing on the net, and until everybody has high-speed connections, we want to respect both your limited time and our composers' creative efforts. So you can audition clips using RealAudio 2 mono or RealAudio 3/5 mono/stereo or lo-fi streaming TrueSpeech, and the hi-fi stereo non-streaming Xing MPEG-2 versions. Oh yes. There are also PCM .wav files on some pages where audio quality is essential to the character of the electroacoustic pieces, and we're moving in the direction of adding more MP3 files. Get a wonderful MP3 player from Winamp.

• We have contact information for all the composers on their individual pages. Please check there, and write or email them directly. We respect our composers' privacy if they ask, so some of them have a minimum of contact information, or none at all. For the 'unreachable' composers, we'll be happy to forward any email you send to us through our contact page.

• Probably. But we spend our time making sure it's easy for you to find your way around without being a nethead or getting the hottest, latest whatever. We also have a big interest in accessibility, as Kalvos is report author for web accessibility company OrbitAccess. So whatever you think of our design, remember that music is our message, not gear. (But, uh, contributions help, as well as volunteers to make transcripts of the shows.)

• It's our graphic, the K & D logo. It means 'and'. Together. Both. Kalvos & Damian. Composers & Audiences. Composers & Composers. Music & Ears. Multiple &'s. The web & us all.