Rethinking the Digital Remix

clipped from www.allacademic.com Gunkel, David. “Rethinking the Digital Remix: Mash-ups and the Metaphysics of Recording” Critical evaluations of mash-ups and remixes tend to congregate around two poles. On the one hand, these often clever recombinations of recorded music are celebrated as innovative and creative interventions in the material of bland commodity culture. On the other hand, they are often reviled as derivative, inauthentic, and illegal because they do nothing more than appropriate and reconfigure the intellectual property of others. In making this admittedly unconventional argument, however, the essay does not endeavor to position the mash-up as anything unique or innovative. Instead, it demonstrates how mash-ups, true to their thoroughly derivative nature, plunder, reuse, and remix anomalies that are already available in and constitutive of recorded music.

Preserve the Net

Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

clipped from www.nocleanfeed.com What is the ‘Clean Feed’? The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access. Despite being almost universally condemned by the public, ISPs, State Governments, Media and censorship experts, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy is determined to force this filter into your home.

Video Mash-Up Mixing

clipped from www.pirate-university.org The mashing up of videos is the newest element in the mash up genre, people are mixing videos as well as re-editing movies. Famous directors have even admitted they wish they could re cut their films and provide multiple versions to the public. Steven Soderbergh director of “Sex, Lie & Videotape” and “Ocean 11” said this about mash up videos “I have ideas like that – video mash-ups. Some of them I’ve done privately. But there’s no way for them to be seen legally. I wish we could come up with a system that allowed someone to do a Grey Album without having to pay millions of dollars for music rights. A system in which rights holders share profits of a new piece of work and people can access it without breaking the law.”

When copyright law meets the ‘mash-up’

clipped from www.boycott-riaa.com Record producer Brian Burton knew he’d done something technically illegal when he electronically blended tracks from the Beatles’ “White Album” and vocals from Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” into a CD called “The Grey Album.” But he was so excited by the mix of Fab Four riffs and Jay-Z raps that he badly wanted people to hear it. “When I was finished, it was the biggest sense of accomplishment I’ve had over anything,” he said. So in January, the Los Angeles-based Burton, who records as DJ Danger Mouse, made a couple of thousand copies of the disc and started mailing them out.

How to make a modern novel

clipped from books.guardian.co.uk Film-makers use jump cuts, freeze frames, slow motion. Musicians remix, scratch, sample. Can’t we writers have some fun as well?

Roots of the remix

clipped from en.wikipedia.org Since the beginnings of recorded sound in the late 19th century, certain people have enjoyed the ability to rearrange the normal listening experience with technology. With the advent of easily editable magnetic tape in the 1940s and 1950s, such alterations became more common. In those decades the experimental genre of musique concr�te used tape loops of music and environmental sounds to create sound compositions that were the forerunners of electronic music. Less artistically lofty edits produced medleys or novelty recordings of various types. Modern remixing had its roots in the dance hall culture of late-1960s/early-1970s Jamaica. The fluid evolution of music that encompassed ska, rocksteady, reggae and dub was embraced by local mixing wizards who deconstructed and rebuilt tracks to suit the tastes of their audience.

war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music

clipped from roychristopher.com Since postmodernism as a mode of thinking and of theory-building is so beleaguered by misconception, misuse, and general ambiguity, this is an attempt to use DJ culture as a concrete example of the postmodern condition in the overlap of music and commerce. Twenty or so years ago, the Hip-hop DJ emerged as a vigilante on this landscape of music as commodity. While remixing and recontextualizing the product, he decentralized the power of the record company. DJs break the code. They reorganize the power structure in the world of sound. The product is no longer the be-all, end-all, but just another piece of the new story. This is what the DJ in Hip-hop does when he combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create entirely new compositions. The music represents a future without a past.

Hey DJ – Web 2.0 and remix culture

clipped from www.jonathanboutelle.com Web 2.0 is not blogs and blogging. But mass quantities of user generated content (both on commercial sites like amazon and blogs alike) set the stage for Web 2.0 by providing a moral pretext for remixing. If the value of the content is created by we the people, then we the people should be able to take that content back and build new things with it. The heart of Web 2.0 is about being able to remix and integrate without a negotiation, without permission even. It’s about being able to take an rss feed or an open API or data scraped from an XHTML website and grab that data, jam it together with another data source of the same kind, and build something new. Web 2.0 is about sampling, about mixing, about mash-ups. The web 2.0 hacker takes APIs and uses them the way a DJ uses albums, recombining disparate (already valuable) material into something fresh and new.

DJ Spooky Raps About Remixing

clipped from www.wired.com I think so many issues right now around sampling and digital media in general are kind of at a crossroads…. I I sample all sorts of stuff. The strategy, of course, is to make it unrecognizable. That means sampling has to be a kind of shredder — the equivalent of when you throw away your credit card bill and put it through. I throw away certain recorded sounds and shred them so they are unrecognizable in the same way you would trace someone’s credit identity. They do come after you for both cases. Take for example James Joyce. He would take motifs from posters in the city streets when he was walking and have a notepad and write them down, and they would appear in his book. He would sample stuff from advertising, from other authors, from magazine articles. To me, with hip-hop and electronic music, you are looking at sound as a kind of theater, where samples are almost like voices that you can take from a script….

Daring to remix

clipped from findarticles.com In pop music the concept of remixing has risen from cottage industry to big business as quickly as the industry worked out that one hit could equal two pay-days. Pop industry now thinks in terms of a release followed by a remix, which can range from a rip-off to a genuine improvement on the original. On the whole the new production gives the piece contemporary relevance, which is to say the potential to make jazz appeal to a new, younger audience – shades of Dadaists and early surrealists trying to bring their art to the people as a part of the modernist project of social transformation. The approach is a close cousin of popular music’s response to postmodernism, DJ culture, immortalised in Grandmaster Flash’s `Wheels of Steel’, a collage of seven minutes of existing recordings. This new world has no rules.