The program continues to highlight choices from its 2024 Holiday list. This episode will continue the show’s highlights from its 2024 Holiday List and will feature an interview with Simon Vansintjan and Alex Rodríguez, the co-founders of Mirlo. Mirlo is an online audio distribution and patronage platform that strives to be radical, accessible, open-source, modular, and standards-based. Vernon and his guests will discuss Mirlo’s advancements and future endeavors as a worker cooperative.
Simon Vansintjan is a programmer and mutual aid, solidarity economy, and dual power organizer in Washington, DC. In his free time, he plays soccer, guitar and banjo, and doodles. He’s done weekly radio on public radio and music journalism in a past life. Simon has worked as a software developer for UN organizations, Fortune 500 companies, user experience agencies, fast growing start-ups, not-for-profit organizations, open-source software, and open data platform.
Alex Rodríguez is a trombonist, anthropologist, and organizer working at the confluences of music and social transformation. He currently teaches in the Department of Music at Wellesley College and holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, where his research focused on jazz clubs and the communities that sustain them in Los Angeles, USA; Santiago, Chile; and Novosibirsk, Siberia. His writing on the contemporary jazz world has appeared in The Newark Star-Ledger, NPR Music, LA Weekly, and DownBeat, among other outlets. He has also trained in Deep Listening through the Center for Deep Listening and is currently preparing his debut album project, Somewhere Else!!!!, with three Chilean collaborators. Alex has worked in the solidarity economy movement as co-founder of the mental health worker cooperative, Catalyst Cooperative Healing, as a working member of Sociocracy for All, and as an Artist-Owner of Ampled.
Mirlo provides a user-friendly space to help musicians sell music, manage subscriptions, and share with their supporters.
