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.

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.

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.

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.

foundtracks: an experiment in remix culture

clipped from foundtracks.blogspot.com foundtracks melbourne, vic, Australia foundtracks is a third year media project collated by sarah bell of rmit university, melbourne australia. it is a collaborative venture which invites savvy home-producers & artists to create music utilizing a paintbox of found sounds. the tracks will then be made available for download & further remixing. this is a creative commons project. for more information email me at s3107861 at student dot rmit dot edu dot au.

The Song Doesn’t Remain the Same

clipped from www.wired.com Budding musicians who want to make an impression online don’t need to download fancy software, set up a website or scour MySpace for potential friends. In fact, they often don’t even need to know how to play a single note. Community sites like Jamglue, Splice and SingShot are combining social networking with innovative tools that let users create, share and remix each other’s songs inside a web browser. Interactive software like Flash and Ajax are fueling an explosion of online services that give the web’s artistic amateurs a stage on which to display their talents.

The History of Sampling v1.2

clipped from jessekriss.com

this is not memorex: sample culture revisited

clipped from www.vagueterrain.net Buried in the subtext of that anecdote is the following: regardless of how we frame it, sampling is essentially an act of curation. Specific fragments are foregrounded and implicit in that selection is the exclusion of countless other memories and moments. The endgame in the act of sampling, whether reconsidering the familiar or resurrecting the forgotten, is to create an arena for discourse. In examining the constellation of projects we have brought together a few themes begin to emerge.