Image source: Copyright Criminals

Text source: Cnet

When Paul Miller, aka DJ Spooky, says he thinks musicians should be able to remix samples of others’ clips into new works, he puts his money where his mouth is.

Miller is part of a group of musicians including Public Enemy’s Chuck D; Parliament Funkadelic’s George Clinton; and the band De La Soul who are allowing the public to mash up audio snippets from interviews they’ve given into submissions for a new remixing competition.

The Copyright Criminals Remix Contest, which is sponsored by the nonprofit copyright licensing organization Creative Commons, is all about promoting remixing culture and encouraging artists like Miller to make their work legally and affordably available for other musicians to manipulate.

Creative Commons has built a licensing system that allows content creators to decide which usage rights to their work to grant others. In every case, the licenses require attribution to the creator. Some allow users to manipulate licensed work for any non-commercial purpose, while others don’t. The ultimate point is to faciliate copyrights that are flexible on which rights users get.

Read the entire article at Cnet

Image and text source: Key Board Mag

January 2005

Court rules all digital sampling illegal and the record industry objects — but you still have options

Get this: According to a fall 2004 ruling by the 6th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, any use of a digital sample of a recording without a license is a violation of copyright, regardless of size or significance. In its decision in Bridgeport Music et al. vs. Dimension Films, the court said simply, “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any way.”

“As far as sampling of recordings, they didn’t make it gray; they made it a line in the sand,” says Jay Cooper, a leading entertainment arts lawyer and a former president of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS). Previously, courts had applied the question of size and significance to copyright infringement claims, but the new ruling changes that for sampling. Cooper says, “I think they went a little far afield from what the law has been in the past. Basically, the law has generally been there has to be more than a minimal use . . . this case basically said that you could take one note and that could be copyright infringement. They really did say that.”

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Image and text source: Discogs

Note: This is definitely one of the most nostalgic mashups I’ve encountered so far. It features some important and popular songs since the eighties, and the best part is that it’s non-linear; jumping from one time period to the next, all in the name of the right [re]mix. “Rhythmic modularity” is what I call this type of aesthetic which disregards linear history.

Label: Ministry Of Sound
Catalog#: MOSCD135
Format: 2 x CD, Mixed
Country: UK
Released: 19 Feb 2007
Genre: Electronic, Hip Hop, Pop
Style: House, Hip Hop, Trance
Credits: DJ Mix – Cut Up Boys
Notes:
Rating: 5.0/5 (2 votes) Rate It
Submitted by: DukeD

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Dr. Octagon Chapter 8

Image source: my.illhill.com/

Text source: CTheory

December 4, 2002

“I can’t pay no doctor bills but Whitey’s on the moon.” Earlier this year, while Mark Shuttleworth orbited the earth at a dazzling 66 sunrises a day in a piece of space junk called Soyuz, an email did the rounds of left-leaning South Africans, and ended up in my inbox one day. The message reproduced some complaints from a poem by Gil-Scott Heron:

The man just upped my rent last night cuz Whitey’s on the moon
No hot water, no toilets, no lights but Whitey’s on the moon.
I wonder why he’s cheap tetracycline uppin me. Cuz Whitey’s on the moon?
I was already givin’ him fifty a week but now Whitey’s on the moon.

Thirty years after Gil Scott Heron chanted his dissatisfaction with the US cold war space programme, race relations have changed, perhaps not entirely but significantly, in the US and at the tip of this continent. Other things have changed too.

Read the entire article at CTheory.

Image source: Dusty Groove

Text source: Nettime.org and Djspooky.com

November 20, 2005
The following is an interview with Carlo Simula for his book
MILLESUONI. OMAGGIO A DELEUZE E GUATTARI (Cronopio Edizioni)

Contributions will include Guy-Marc Hinant (Sub Rosa), Philippe Franck (transcultures, le maubege), Bernhard Lang, Tim Murphy, Achim Szepanski – and many others. I think it’s an update on some issues that have been percolating.

Smell the brew.
Paul,
Tunis, Tunisia 11/20/05

1) You’ve often referred in your interviews to how much contemporary philosophy has influenced your work. Foucault said “Un jour, peut-être, le siècle sera deleuzien”, how much and in which way Deleuze and Guattari influenced you? And what you feel is interesting in their work?

The idea of the “remix” is pretty trendy these days – as usual people tend to “script” over the multi-cultural links: the economics of “re-purposing,” “outsourcing” and above all, of living in an “experience economy” – these are things that fuel African American culture, and it’s active dissemination in all of the diaspora of Afro-Modernity. My take on Deleuze and Guattari is to apply a “logic of the particular” to the concept of contemporary art. Basically it’s to say that software has undermined all of the categories of previous production models, and in turn, molded the “computational models” of how “cultural capital,” as Pierre Bourdieu coined it, mirrors various kinds of production models in a world where “sampling” (mathematical and musical), has become the global language of urban youth culture. Eduoard Glissant, the Afro-Caribbean philosopher/linguist liked to call this “creolization” – I like to call it “the remix.” Philosophy is basically a reflective activity. It always requires a surface to bounce off of. We don’t exist in a cultural vacuum.

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Image and text source: Los Angeles City Beat

Note: This article is useful to understand the process of the remixer. Although the intro may be putting down mash ups as simplistic, there are other good tips for further research.

January 22, 2004

DJ Bill Hamel is moving up, and not just because of his Grammy-nominated take on Seal’s ‘Get It Together’

The do-it-yourself revolution in music gets no closer to the top echelons of the industry than with the modern dance-music remixer. The remixer is often born of a DJ’s desire to fit a pop song into a linear, up-tempo dance-floor structure. A remix can be composed from a pop-song chorus, drum-machine beats, and simple keys. It can be accomplished using only a laptop. The most rudimentary remixes are known as “mash-ups,” basically DJs mixing together two popular tracks and recording the blend for posterity. Then there’s the bootleg, the homemade pop remix done on spec. Finally, there’s the official, label-sanctioned remix, often a DJ’s own artistic take on a pop song that doesn’t lift the chorus and hook wholesale, but rather offers a fresh interpretation.

Read the entire article at Los Angeles City Beat

Image source: Gullbuy

Text source: The New Yorker

January 10, 2005

In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of “Debra,” a song by Beck from his 1999 album “Midnite Vultures.” Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with Max Roach, adjusted the tempo of “Debra” and added live drums and human beat-box noises that he recorded at his small but tidy house in Long Island City. Then he sifted through countless a-cappella vocals archived on several hard drives. Some a-cappellas are on commercially released singles, specifically intended for d.j. use, while others appear on the Internet, having been leaked by people working in the studio where the song was recorded, or sometimes even by the artist.

After auditioning almost a thousand vocals, Brown found that an a-cappella of “Frontin’,” a collaboration between the rapper Jay-Z and the producer Pharrell Williams, was approximately in the same key as “Debra.” The two songs are not close in style—“Debra” is a tongue-in-cheek take on seventies soul music, while “Frontin’ ” is hard and shimmering computer music—but the vocalists are doing something similar. Brown exploited this commonality, and used his software to put the two singers exactly in tune.

Read the entire article at The New Yorker

Image source: gohomeproductions.co.uk

Text source: earcandy_mag.tripod.com

December 17, 2004

Intro:
Some call it artistic musical creations, while others cry that it is blasphemy! It is all the rage in the U.K. and it has even gone mainstream, with MTV U.K. celebrating it on “MTV-Mash”. This new craze is called “mash-ups” and it involves taking the vocal from one song and joining it to the instrumental track of another. For instance, take a “mash-up” like “Paperback Believer”, which uses the musical track of the Monkees “I’m a Believer” with the vocals from The Beatles “Paperback Writer”.

Probably the best-known of the recent mash-up’s is the notorious “Grey Album” by Dangermouse, which mixed Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with The Beatles “White Album”. In February, when the record label EMI overreacted and blocked distribution of “The Grey Album” it pretty much created an instant hit.

And earlier this year, David Bowie had a contest in which he asked fans to create a new song using computer music software to blend or “mash up” two existing tracks – with the winner winning a car!

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Image source: http://www.civilunrest.biz/

Text source: http://makerfaire.com/cj/

Originally learned about it at Rhizome.org

Note: This announcement is so good as as an idea recalling the good ol’days, that it’s worth keeping around for nostalgia’s sake. (But I admit I keep it here for the sake of my ongoing archive.) I can’t think of a DJ from the 80’s who didn’t start out mixing tunes with a tape-player. I did, and it improved my skills on the ones and twos once I could afford to buy them. I do know of another CJ Championship organized by Beige: 2004 BEIGE Cassette Jockey World Championship. Below is the announcement:

2007 Cassette Jockey World Championships

*** CALL FOR COMPETITORS ***

CALLING ALL: Cassette Jockies… Retro-Tech Lovers… Magnetic Media Monsters… Circuit Benders… Multi-Media DJs… Walkman Hot-Rodders… we want you at the:

2007 CASSETTE JOCKEY WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS

at the Make Magazine Maker Faire!

http://makerfaire.com/cj/

In 2003 at a festival in Chicago, a group of retro-tech geniuses organized The Cassette Jockey World Championships. Like the popular DJ (Disk Jockey) competitions with record-toting DJs showing off their turntable skills, the CJ Championships showcases skills and styles in the venerable world of cassettes. Since CJs were encouraged to hot-rod their own equipment, eviscerated boomboxes, disembodied tape heads, and overclocked Walkmans were the weapons of choice… anything that used the standard cassette as its ammo.

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Image and text source: The Stranger

Jun 20 – Jun 26, 2002 issue

Despite its large Mexican and Asian communities, and a black neighborhood that’s more distinctive than the black community in Seattle, Portland seems isolated and singular. Isolated because its architecture, laws, and civic infrastructure are unique, as if the municipal and design trends radiating from the big centers of the world failed to reach this remote outpost, and in this splendid isolation Portland established its own ideals. Singular because its cultural products seem of one mind, one lifestyle, one world (white, middle-class), and not like, say, hiphop, whose parts were fused in boroughs that contained various ethnic groups (African American, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Jewish).

Portland, however, is not completely isolated as an artistic community, being intricately connected with cities like Seattle, Vancouver, BC, and San Francisco, and it isn’t confined solely to the production of postmodern novels or rock music. In fact, Portland is one of the North American capitals (in terms of production and distribution) of dub music, an abstract form of reggae that originated on the streets of Kingston, Jamaica. The reason for Portland’s dub capital status is the presence of Systemwide, the house band for a thriving dub label called Bucolic Sound Investigations (BSI).

A SHORT HISTORY OF DUB

If you already know what dub is, then I recommend you skip this part and resume the feature in the next section, titled “Portland’s System.”

There is a famous story of a Rastaman and a hippie dancing at a reggae concert. The hippie dances wildly, flapping his arms and moving frantically. The hippie’s expressive dancing irritates the chilled-out Rastaman, who, when accidentally struck by the hippie’s hand, finally tells him to stand still and dance. This is precisely what one must do when listening to reggae: stand still and dance. Reggae is less dance music and more soul music. It’s the soul, not the body, that dances when one listens to Bunny Wailer or the Roots Radics or the Itals. Reggae is so preoccupied with the soul (its condition, its qualities, its shivers and shades) that a whole subcategory of the music is devoted to reproducing soul worlds or geist dimensions. That subcategory is dub.

Read the entire article at The Stranger