Image and text source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/tx/
documentaries/remix.shtml

Date of publication, uncertain

1Xtra’s ‘Remix Kid’ Seani B uncovers the origins of remixing…
How has the art has changed over the years?

First developed by Jamaican reggae producers in the 1960s to create dub music, remixing was picked up by hip hop pioneers and disco DJs to develop new styles.

P Diddy is one the most famous remixers of all time – if that title is in your sights, listen up for Seani’s tips on how to put together your own remix track.
Who’s the remixer of the remixers? How has remixing blurred the boundaries between different musical genres in the UK?

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Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times

Image and text source: NYTimes

March 14, 2007

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — In a classroom at a community center near a slum here, a street-smart teacher offers a dozen young students tips on how to improve their graffiti techniques. One floor below, in a small soundproof studio, another instructor is teaching a youthful group of would-be rappers how to operate digital recording and video equipment.
Students practice drawing because of graffiti’s connection to hip-hop.

This is one of Brazil’s Culture Points, fruit of an official government program that is helping to spread hip-hop culture across a vast nation of 185 million people. With small grants of $60,000 or so to scores of community groups on the outskirts of Brazil’s cities, the Ministry of Culture hopes to channel what it sees as the latent creativity of the country’s poor into new forms of expression.

The program, conceived in 2003, is an initiative of Brazil’s minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, who will be speaking on digital culture and related topics on Wednesday at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference in Austin, Tex. Though today one of the country’s most revered pop stars, Mr. Gil, 64, was often buy cytotec ostracized at the start of his own career and so feels a certain affinity with the hip-hop culture emerging here.

Also see:

Brazilian Hip Hop on the rise
http://madeinbrazil.typepad.com/
madeinbrazil/2007/03/brazilian_hip_h.html
Brazilian Hip Hop On The Rise

Image source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/
blogs/technology_news/2875526.html

Text source: NYTimes

February 22, 2007

WHAT do flying plastic pigs, dancing daisies and robotic Barbie dolls have in common? An iPod.
Skip to next paragraph
Lars Klove for The New York Times

With more than 90 million players sold worldwide since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has spawned a lucrative accessories industry. At least 3,000 types of iPod extras have received Apple’s blessing — mostly no-nonsense options like cases, earbuds and amplified speaker systems, including the $300 SoundDock line made by Bose.

But another trend is developing, one more playful and not always with Apple’s approval or knowledge.

Call it iSilly, a growing number of products in which fun is emphasized over function, and cute or irreverent often trumps wow. All of these items, some costing as little as $10, have been created to plug into an iPod — or, in many cases, any audio source that has a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.

Read the entire article

Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22, No. 1. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 150-158.

Text source: http://www.jstor.org/view/00931896/ap040085/04a00070/0

(Need to be affiliated with an academic research institution to access)

Image source: http://www.stern.de/computer-technik/
computer/556287.html?eid=551201

Text source: Yahoo News

Mar 9, 2007

NEW YORK (Billboard) – You could spend the better part of a day listing the things Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five did first: In the embryonic days of the New York rap scene, they were among its first superstars, they helped pioneer the freestyle battle and Grandmaster Flash was instrumental in inventing the art of break-beat DJ’ing.

Legend also has it rapper Mele Mel was the first to dub himself an “MC”; fellow rapper Cowboy is credited with coining the term “hip-hop.”

So it makes perfect sense to add another first to the list: On March 12, Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five will become the first hip-hop act inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was 25 years ago that their groundbreaking single “The Message” helped hip-hop kick down the door into a world of bigger audiences, and in their third year of eligibility, the act — comprising Grandmaster Flash, Kid Creole, Mele Mel, Scorpio, Raheim and the late Cowboy — will join a class that includes R.E.M., Van Halen, Patti Smith and the Ronettes.

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Image and text source: http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7is1/desi.htm

Jouvert, Volume 7, Issue 1 (Autumn 2002)

College of Staten Island/CUNY, Staten Island NY

Copyright © 2002 by Ashley Dawson, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

1. On a sweltering August afternoon in 1996, New York City’s Summerstage concert series brought the South Asian dance music known as bhangra to Central Park. South Asian families from all over the tri-state area sunned themselves, jostled for room, and danced in a jam-packed sandy space under sun-dappled plane trees. New York turntablist DJ Rekha added some hometown flavor, spinning bhangra remixes to much applause before the Safri Boys, one of Britain’s hottest bhangra bands, took the stage. Although bhangra remix had been transforming South Asian youth culture in the US at least since the release of UK musician Bally Sagoo’s pathbreaking “Star Crazy” album in 1991, the concert in Central Park was a particular milestone. Here, visible to a broad public, was a display of the compelling cultural forms through which South Asians of the diaspora were articulating new, composite identities. The multiple regional contrasts and tensions that define identity within the subcontinent were harmonized in this diasporic context. The result was a powerful sense of cultural unity and pride. Desi (Hindi for “homeboy” or “homegirl”) culture had definitely arrived. [1]

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Image source: DJ Food

Text source Boing Boing

October 5, 2005

This is a 40-minute MP3 of a British radio broadcast called “DJ Food – Raiding the 20th Century” that attempted to sum up the entire cut-up/remix/mash up music movement. It’s lots of crazy, whacky, jarring, harmonious, tricksy, and serendipitous sound, and it made me laugh and think. The landing page for the MP3 has an exhaustive list of the samples employed.

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Image source: http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/

Text source: http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/
humanitieschair/cannibal.html 
1. In your study of rap in Pragmatist aesthetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) you explicitly use the concept of cannibalism to describe rap’s aesthetic of appropriation, its sampling of prerecorded music and other sounds. You even refer to the early rappers, on page 203, as “musical cannibals of the urban jungle.” What has been the reaction to this characterization of rap?
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Image source: Business Week

Text source: Meta Critic

If the concept of “The Beatles, remixed” saddens you, know that original Beatles producer George Martin was at the helm for this project, which serves as the soundtrack to the Vegas-based Cirque du Soleil show of the same name. The 26 mashed-up tracks here were augmented with additional instrumentation and vocals performed by The Beatles themselves, culled from hours of original demo and master tapes, with pieces of 130 songs ultimately represented in some form.

Text source: The Guardian

The Beatles, Love

**** (Apple/EMI)

Alexis Petridis
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian

The Beatles Love

In about 2002, the bootleg mash-up was big news. A hopelessly named phenomenon that involved producers illegally mixing two unlikely old records together to make a third, the mash-up made celebrities of some strange figures – Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton and secretive producer Richard X among them – but the Beatles may have been the sub-genre’s true stars. They were involved both in its artistic zenith – the Grey Album, on which Danger Mouse pitted Jay-Z’s rapping against music from the White Album – and the moment when mash-ups meandered into pointlessness: Go Home Productions’ Paperback Believer, which used two fantastic records, Paperback Writer and the Monkees’ Daydream Believer, to make a noticeably less brilliant third.

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King Tubby

Image source: reggae.com
Text source: Zone 0

Mix, mix again, remix: copyleft, cut ‘n’ paste, digital jumble, cross-fade, dub, tweak the knob, drop the needle, spin, merge, morph, bootleg, pirate, plagiarize, enrich, sample, break down, reassemble, multiply input source, merge output, decompose, recompose, erase borders, remix again. These are among many of the possible actions involved in what can be broadly labeled “remix culture” – an umbrella term which covers a wide array of creative stances and initiatives, such as: plunderphonics, detritus.net, recombinant culture, open source, compostmodernism, mash-ups, cut-ups, bastard pop, covers, mixology, peer to peer, creative commons, “surf, sample, manipulate”, and uploadphonix. (more…)