Who is Shelly Blake-Plock?

He’s me.

How do your music, research, and advisory work connect?

In that they connect at all, they connect in that they are all aspects of me.

What types of companies or founders or artists do you work with?

I like to work with people who have trouble explaining what they do.

How is your approach different?

I tend to think about things from the point of view of producing music. Meaning: I see my role, whether I’m working with an artist or a developer or a founder, as being responsible for helping them to do their best work — something honestly reflective of them and unique to their vision.

How does your advisory process typically work?

My advisory services are described over here.

What’s “Scarecrow Cipher Field”? Is it a company, a method, a game?

It’s a project I’ve been working on which fits somewhere between Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies and discovery methodologies developed by the National Science Foundation.

What is SQL LRS, and who uses it?

It’s what’s called a Learning Record Store. Basically, it validates data as conformant against xAPI (IEEE 9274.1.1) and then stores and provides access to and retrieval of it. It’s open source and distributed under the Apache 2.0 license and is generally deployed by enterprise learning and training organizations across government and industry.

What kind of music do you make, and how can I hear it?

I’ve been making music for over 37 years at this point [as of summer 2025]. I started out playing acoustic guitar in folk and blues settings, then got involved in hardcore punk and noise rock. Over the years, I’ve produced music across genres ranging from honky-tonk to free improvisation to black metal to jazz to film music to ambient. I think of myself as more of a music producer than as a musician — and generally, I prefer the studio to touring. You can check out my musical archives here.

Do you perform live or collaborate with other musicians?

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to play when a host of amazing musicians including Joel Grip, John Berndt, Eve Risser, Sam Burt, Rose Hammer Burt, Bob Wagner, Lawrence Lanahan, Susan Alcorn, Niklas Barnö, Lars Enok Åhlund, Twig Harper, Matthew H. Welch, Bill Shade, Mike Hilton, Lyle Kissack, Carly Ptak, Jenny Gräf Sheppard, and many others. And through High Zero, I’ve been fortunate to play alongside Dan Deacon, Jennifer Walshe, Thomas DiMuzio, Wobbly, Kenta Nagai, and many more. I also regularly show up at bluegrass sessions across the DC area… so you never know, if you play banjo we might run into one another.

What does “folk” mean to you?

I think it’s kinda like the way Woody Guthrie described himself — as creating things that help people see the goodness and strength in themselves. I don’t think it’s limited to a genre of music and traditional instruments (though that’s where I started a long long time ago). I think heavy metal is a type of folk art. I think open source is a type of folk art. I think applied research can be a type of folk art. I think talking about baseball is most definitely a type of folk art. I hope that the work that I’ve done and that I do can strengthen people in some way, even if I wasn’t always strong myself.