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.

Foucault’s Fault

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com But don’t get confused by this romantic description of the philosophical work: if someone is recognized as a philosopher only by the new concepts that he has introduced into the philosophical discourse [D&G], and if new and original are nothing but an illusion [Barthes], then philosophy is not the art of creating concepts but rather the art of rebranding preexisting concepts. The philosopher doesn’t have much choice but to refurbish and rebrand old concepts and present them as original ones. This is a tough situation: if you don’t quote you are accused of plagiarism and of the hubris of being original; if you quote (explicitly – by referring to philosophers; implicitly – by reusing known concepts) you’re accused of not being original, hence – not a philosopher. The game is, therefore, to quote all along your thesis until that point where you bring up your own rebranded (yet necessarily preexisting) concept – that which you present and pretend to be your own.

The Death of the Author; the Birth of the Voice

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com “Given that the human history of ideas, progress, art, etc. is the history of remix, i.e. the unexpected association of different, seemingly unrelated memes, should “remix” be classified as an authentic voice or an unauthentic one?” In “The Death of the Author” (1967) Barthes states that “the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”. Any text, therefore, be it an “original” or a “remix” is deemed to be the reincarnation of older texts. Let’s forget, than, the illusion of authenticity [, or of truth, or of reality etc.] – there’s no such thing. “We know that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture. Like Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal copyists, both sublime and comical and whose profound absurdity precisely designates the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture forever anterior, never original”. Here’s an excerpt from Barthes:

DJ Spooky’s Remix Simulacrum – “Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own”, DJ Spooky

clipped from digitalphilosophy.wordpress.com It can refer to the pessimistic Baudrillardian Integral Reality theory, in which anything is a simulacrum, a fake, including our “self”, our voice. [OR] It can be understood as an optimistic, web2.0 share-all style, in which the right to remix and to appropriate others’ voices goes mainstream.

WHAT COMES AFTER REMIX? by Lev Manovich

clipped from remixtheory.net It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well. Remixing originally had a precise and a narrow meaning that gradually became diffused. Although precedents of remixing can be found earlier, it was the introduction of multi-track mixers that made remixing a standard practice. With each element of a song – vocals, drums, etc. – available for separate manipulation, it became possible to “re-mix” the song: change the volume of some tracks or substitute new tracks for the old ounces. Gradually the term became more and more broad, today referring to any reworking of already existing cultural work(s).

The Coke Side of Life

Visit http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/cokesideofliferemix/ to ‘remix’ your very own Coke poster!