The Echo Chamber Blog

Welcome to our 1,000^th post. It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve finally made it. And we’re actually here with nothing much to offer besides our thanks for your continued and growing support in our blogging endeavors.

For those unfamiliar with TECB, we’re a music website run by two longtime friends and Rhode Islanders. I’m Chris, the one who still lives in RI, but my skinnier, vegan counterpart Verbal Spacey now holds down the glorious city of Long Beach, California. We’ve been at this since September of 2008 and our site has taken on a number of shapes since its inception.

TECB started as a posse – each member with a different degree of affiliation to Echo Lake, the place where a number of us lived and started our friendships. Our theme was to not have a theme, which as broad-brushed and loosely-based at that sounds, was a decent idea in theory. Politics, music, film, food, sports, television, women, and booze were all topics central to our focus and it was fun being a part of such an abstract collective and online community.

Unfortunately it didn’t last. Contributions started to lack and the site never picked up any steam which was a detriment to the perpetual excitement that once was. Verbal and I were always the two most active members, not to mention the founders, so we made the tough decision to go forward with just the two of us.

With that decision came a focus — MUSIC — and a clean-up. All posts that didn’t pertain to music in one way or another were deleted. (In some instances it was hard to watch them go, almost as much as the contributors.) This was the obvious choice for us, considering we started the site almost exclusively to get nerdy and broadcast our thoughts about the music we loved. Independent hip-hop was our starting point. Then we clamped down on the local scene, laying claim to the most active and consistent online support system for hip-hop in Rhode Island.

Music submissions to TECB started to skyrocket, people were finally noticing our progress, and we built ourselves a miniscule yet rather admirable reputation in the digital world. In some cases it hasn’t always been positive. Our might-blow-up-but-won’t-go-pop mentality has always drawn a clear line in the sand and some people haven’t seen eye to eye with how we go about our business.

Regardless, we never cared much. TECB isn’t doing any favors and we’re hard-nosed about maintaining our website’s integrity, pushing on just the way we’re doing now. This type of shared attitude has been instrumental in the expansion of TECB and the generally positive reception of our site — a site that now encompasses every genre of music that Verbal and I mess with. We’ve built something that we’re pretty proud of, stubborn bastards or not.

Last year I vented a little to Verbal about some TECB struggle or another, and he asked what else I’d expect from the “niche-iest of niche music websites” in existence.

He was right.

We’re based out of Rhode Island, the smallest state on the map, and we operate at a rate of 40% RI hip-hop postings. Verbal is quite possibly the most active writer in the world when considering his undying love for and dedication to the uber-obscure sub-genre of progressive hip-hop. And I counter all of that rap music with rampant posts about female pop artists, old rock and roll, and other music you wouldn’t come to expect from a website whose clout is based primarily off its hip-hop representation. Something else that separates TECB from the others is how we pride ourselves as music buyers — a rarity in this day in age, especially considering how 99% of our competitors, who we slight at every given opportunity, and their visitors thrive on whatever can be downloaded at no cost.

So, yeah, we’re a little bit different from the rest. Content is diverse and updates are somewhat sparse, but we like it that way. We do our best to keep it as authentic and honest as possible — for us, for our readers.

Much thanks to everyone that has stuck with The Echo Chamber Blog through Chris’ thickness and Verbal’s thinness. Also, many thanks to the new readers for giving us a chance. Hopefully you’ll all be back for more. We appreciate it and plan to keep moving forward.

Creek it.

Filed under: 401 Gettin' It Done, Album Talk/Review, CA All Day, Events, For All The Broke Willies, Hip-Hop, Instrumental, Music, News, Recent Purchases, This Is Not Hip-Hop | Tagged: TECB, The Echo Chamber Blog | Leave a Comment »