Sabbatical Times

Hello Listeners,

so you may be wondering where Tucker and I have been. Well we've been thinking long and hard about Motif Radio and its direction for the future, sorry to desert you.

Together we have come up with a plan (listed below):

1. We need to get some funding. Which means that we need some time beyond making the show to apply for grants.

2. We need to get some advertising out there and get more artists involved in submitting work. Which we need some funding for. (-;

3. We need to change podcast server so that our web page consistently works and the design can be updated. Also a lot of our listeners use Firefox and for some reason the Motif Radio page looks a bit weird and doesn't come up properly in that browser (I strongly suspect that this is a libsyn quirk).

4. We need some new equipment so that we can make field recordings and hopefully in the future move into some video podcasting. Which again equals funding (-;

5. We need to make our own work (which we coincidentally need funding for too). I Have a show coming up in October and I'm going to try and video podcast my performance for you guys some time during that month.

6. An observation that I have made is that people don't tend to use their computers as much in the Summer thus it got increasingly difficult for me to contact people for submissions. So I have decided that Motif Radio needs to be a seasonal occurrence. Motif Radio will now run between February and July each year, with occasional specials at other times. This not only allows people to sit down and listen with their warm cocoa in the winter when it's too cold to go outside (this may only apply to Minnesota and Wisconsin) but it's also gives me time to confirm a line-up of artists in advance.

7. We may also have to, as we proposed before, become 'once-a-month'. I really don't want to do this and if I got a lot more submissions I wouldn't have to. 'Us' working artists have to prioritize though and I know what its like to work 25-30 hours and kill yourself to make art on top of that. We still haven't completely decided about whether we're going to do this yet.

Well I think that about wraps it up. Please don't desert us listeners, we haven't deserted you we're just taking some time for development.

At the moment Motif Radio is kind of an infant; a little moody and occasionally hard-to-handle. We need to move to the next level of our growth! We are aiming to start up again at the beginning of February and don't forget to join us for our first anniversary on February 22nd 2007 put it in your diary.

Thanks for listening,

Fiona

P.s. In the meantime please visit this site as we'll continue to have one-off things going on and check the Two-Artists web page for details of what we're both up to.