Posted by: Justin Grotelueschen on June 9, 2008 08:52 PM | Comments (0)

Now that the conference is a week past, I'm asking myself what I took away from not just the conference, but my trip to Toronto. I actually spent as much time traveling as I did in Toronto, and the 10+ hour drive from Boston was much smoother and more enjoyable than I expected, thanks exclusively to two most excellent travel companions Nick and Amber (with some credit to the pond and sauna action on our return trip via Nick's friend's in upstate NY).

I can't think of many more relaxing journeys for the ear and the soul than spending a weekend with experimental transmissions overwhelming my good senses. But the amazingness of this weekend and this conference is/was the people -- old friends and new, from different professional levels and backgrounds, coming together to share a common passion. This conference is just big enough to have a shot to talk with almost every person in attendance, including the presenters, even though the weekend goes by so quickly. To hear that about half of the paid conference attendees are from the states is good news to me, that enough people know about it to make the experience rich but not too many to make the conference zoo-crazy. The diversity of opinion and perspective within this crowd is something I definitely appreciate, even if we are all radio geeks in our own rights.

So yes, great feelings abound in retrospect, and the one I treasure most is this energy that I'll undoubtedly carry with me for months (hopefully longer). After my first RWB I started a radio show that I feel I never would have started otherwise, using ideas I scribbled down as the last conference sessions wore down and in restaurants during the drive home. In 2005 I thought more about the sonic possibilities in some of the pieces I heard during the conference and translated those thoughts to music I was working on. This year ... we'll see, but I'll let myself be surprised.

And I had a lot of fun doing this blog with Mr. Nick, and maybe we'll be back online here again in future days.

That's it for me, but here's a conference breakdown from Eric Leonardson to shed a few more shades of light.

Godspeed,
JustinG

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