During my recent trip to Oslo I kept bumping into Paal Shervan, formerly of Norway’s By:Larm Festival and now working on the Schous Cultural Brewery project. A Cultural Brewery sounds slightly odd, but really it’s no stranger than our creative industries living in a Custard Factory. The Cultural Brewery is a redevelopment project that is turning a disused brewery into a world class centre for popular music education and culture. I was quite taken with this parallel between our two cities, but I had something much more important to talk to Paal about: that was our mutual interest in developing popular music archives.

The Cultural Brewery has at its centre a popular music heritage centre, and this has a spin off presence online. Paal’s take on the project is slightly different to that taken by the teams at the Birmingham Popular Music Archive and the Home of Metal, and this led us to discuss how technology fits into this picture, and how he has been successful in securing funding and support from the “suits’ that run Oslo. I recorded our discussion which is to be published as our next podcast episodes. The DogA (pictured) where we recorded it was a very busy that day, so the recording quality is a little raw, but the discussion should still be useful to those with an interest in social media, popular music, and archiving projects as well as those with an interest in urban regeneration projects.

You can read more about the Cultural Brewery, By:Larm and Oslo’s cultural scene at the Oslo Technipol website.

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