Fun Friday #2: Meet Ben Fawkes
For our second Fun Friday post of the day, please help me welcome Mr. Ben Fawkes to the SoundCloud team in Berlin! First, listen to his very creative “Hello” below :)
Fun Friday: A Creative Hello from Ben Fawkes! by SoundCloud Community Team
Ben! Hello :). Really creative message you made!
Ja. Hallo.
Just like Julien and I, you work in the wonderful Berlin office, what is your role and what do you like about it so far?
Audio content manager is the title; it basically means business development for anything that is not music related. So predominantly this is podcasts, radio, audio books, field recording, audio messaging, comedy, archiving, audio blogging, drama, education, sound effects, sound design, oral history, ethnomusicology – anything really! I love it because it’s so diverse and open, there’s so much to consider and so many interesting people to work and talk with. For audio, SoundCloud really is a great place to start – it suits so many scenarios from documenting your friends and family to empowering anyone to become a citizen journalist. You could build an entire radio station on SoundCloud if you wanted. It gives anyone an actual voice on the web, so I guess talking about SoundCloud is the thing I like the most so far.
Awesome, so our audience didn’t get to hear your real (lovely) English accent, can you tell us about where you are from? What was re-locating to Berlin like?
From England originally, but have lived in Switzerland a lot of my life, studied in Cardiff, travelled a fair bit. In fact, I came straight from bumming round Buenos Aires to start as an intern at SoundCloud in October. The relocation was OK, it takes time to settle and find somewhere permanent to live, but as long as you hustle around for a place to stay for the first couple of months, things will fall into place.
I know you love music, so I am wondering, what kind of shows do you like going to?
Simple – http://www.songkick.com/users/benfawkes
And what do you like about Berlin so far?
Always something to do, great music everywhere, people to make music with, lots of culture, the people, the crazy people, the history. I’ve lived in quite a few places and been to a lot of cities, Berlin is by far the best. It still has a lot of space, the pace isn’t frantic and intense but….it’s just great.
Any favourite music or sounds on SoundCloud right now?
Can I have some music and some podcasts? Come on please! I have to represent, there’s more than just music on SC:
So music would have to be:
You Mean So Much To Me by BLONDES
And just two podcasts would have to be:
http://soundcloud.com/matescast – great comedy podcast
http://soundcloud.com/bwalker – well produced, story/documentary type podcast in the NPR mode
Can you give us some reasons why someone should join SoundCloud, or our team in particular?
The product is great and there be good peoples.
Any fun facts about yourself?
Er? I once played a scientist in a Chinese infomercial for a product called the Blue Dreal Sleep Instrument (yes dream was spelt that way). It was a small device that had wires to connect to your ears. The idea was that it sent frequencies to your brain to help you sleep. I spent the day standing in front of a green screen pointing at imaginary graphs. I’ve been meaning to put the video up for years, I wish I had now so I could link to it!
Thanks Ben for taking time to do this interview :) Don’t forget to say “Howdy” to Ben below in the comments and on his audio track!