Un interview (en anglais) de Fabrice Collette, dont le nom d’avatar sur SL est Fabrice Crosby, sur le webzine de Second Life The Looking Glass

Le texte complet est ici

Fabrice Crosby (Fabrice Collette in RL) is a professional independent musician from Paris, France. His brand new album, Rouge et Blues, contains twelve fascinating new songs, showing his very personal sound, at the crossroads between jazz, blues, rock and the French song tradition. Some of the best French blues musicians joined him in this enterprise. Fabrice is also very curious about new media.

In SL, he has been very creative trying new ways of promoting his music, synchronizing himself with SL culture. His lovely shoulder pet, the frog “bluesy groovy”, is ubiquitous. He was one of the first musician to use an in-world player allowing residents to listen to his songs for free. Fabrice allows his fans to download his music from http://www.fabricecollette.com who are free to support his independent production with tips and donations.

We met him and asked about his SL experience.

When and why did you decide to become a SL musician?

I met Juel Resistance, a beautiful American singer / songwriter, and we became friends on Myspace. On her page, she was speaking about is SL musical activities. I decided to go there and have a look. I don’t feel like a SL musician, I am just a musician, in Second life as well as in other places, that’s my real life…

A surprise and a delusion in SL.

Well, I wasn’t expecting anything. I just came there to see what was going on and to find out if this place was useful to promote my works. I found a real community involved in artistic activities: musicians of course, but also people running venues, and I found supporters. Outside SL music world, I found very nice human relationships.

You are a professional independent musician, who knows how to use the web. Is SL different, compared with other tools like Myspace or blogs?

It is amazing to see how all those tools have their own culture. As a musician, you have to use them to contact people and spread the world about your work. But only in Second life you are able to put on real cooperations. I have been away for about 3 months, preparing the new album. When I came back, it was very easy to contact old friends, and start to have gigs here again. And for my new show I found 5 avatars (2 dancers and 3 musicians), ready to work with me to put it up, spend time rehearsing and playing the show itself. We are in a very collective and creative dynamic.

Why did you change your way of performing in SL?

At first, I played live concerts. I love them and I will keep on performing live that way, of course: I get the same pleasure that I feel when I play somewhere here in Paris. But there are other ways to share music. Second life has its own culture and aesthetic and what we are trying to do in my new show is to get the best of that, with nice choreographies, fitting movements of avatars with the rhythm, looking for the best colours and visual effects. My goal is to give the best of musical an visual emotion. Moreover, my new album involves several musician and I cant recreate that sound alone: for all these reasons I decided to change my way of performing in SL. Moreover, I am working around a video clip to, with Susi Spicoli as a director, and Selma Selenko as main actress.

Do you have a second life without music?

No…music is a full time life ….