Blue Note’s recording artist Norah Jones with Lee Alexander on bass and Adam Levy on guitars performing at House of Blues in Los Angeles.
Image source: skipbolenstudio.com/

Text source: USA Today

2/12/2007

LOS ANGELES — The music industry is looking ahead to life without copy protection.

Major label EMI — home of Coldplay and Norah Jones — is in discussions with online music stores about selling its music without copy protection, or digital rights management (DRM), according to two sources with direct knowledge of the talks who would not speak for attribution because discussions are ongoing.

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Can I Get An Amen?, 2004
recording on acetate, turntable, PA system, paper documents
dimensions variable
total run time 17 minutes, 46 seconds

Image and project source: nkhstudio.com

Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.

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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Note: The following article is in Spanish only. It includes some of my own theories on Remix.

Image: TRANSFORMACIONES. La imagen de Escher, “remixada” con técnicas del siglo XXI.
Text and image source: Clarin.com

January 20, 2007

CULTURA : UNA PRACTICA QUE INICIARON LOS DJ’S Y SE EXTENDIO EN LA MUSICA

ESPECIAL PARA CLARIN.

Cuando en 1968 los Beatles volvieron de la India con una gran cantidad de canciones bajo el brazo y editaron el archiconocido Álbum Blanco, no imaginaron, ni en sus sueños más psicodélicos, que casi 40 años después ese trabajo sería el germen de otro no menos memorable.

Pero en 2004, el Dj. Brian Burton (popularmente conocido bajo el alias de Danger Mouse) parió El Álbum Gris, una obra conceptual en la cual se fundía la música del “álbum blanco” de los Beatles con la voz y letra del “álbum negro” del rapero Jay- Z. Para la anécdota quedará que, demanda de las discográficas mediante, el trabajo fue retirado de circulación y a las pocas semanas se convertía en un hito, bajado ilegalmente de la red por más de 100.000 personas.

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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…)

Source: The Guardian UK
Thursday April 14, 2005

MP3 blogs are growing in popularity, attracting thousands of users daily. But while bloggers see their relationship with the industry as one of cooperation, it is a legally grey area. Chris Alden reports

The Guardian

“Find a feeling, pass it on.” So sang pop dreamers The Coral two summers ago: these days, it’s the mantra of a new breed of musical bloggers.

MP3 bloggers, as they are known, are people who hunt down and post musical gems — usually hard-to-find or niche MP3s — for others to discuss and, for a limited time, download.

Simon Pott from Bristol is one. As main contributor to Spoilt Victorian Child, a group blog named after a 1993 B-side by The Fall, he thinks of himself as a kind of DJ for the internet.

“I can’t help it,” he says. “If you pick a record up or are listening to something great, you can’t wait to play it out and share your excitement. When I’m at home listening through my records I get the same feeling.”

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Image source: olerkiilerich.dk
Text source The Pinocchio Theory

December 1st, 2004

A Night at the Hip-Hopera, by the Kleptones, is the best mash-up I’ve heard, at least since Strictly Kev’s Raiding the 20th Century. (The Disney Corp. is taking legal action to suppress Hip-Hopera; the Kleptones are no longer allowed to host the mp3s on their own site. But they list other sites that carry the files; these won’t go offline until Disney gets around to contacting each of them individually with cease-and-desist orders. And if these don’t work, Google has a lot of links to it too).

A Night at the Hip-Hopera consists of music by Queen (whose copyright is owned by Disney, hence the cease-and-desist orders), together with vocal tracks taken mostly from various hip hop artists (both current and old skool, ranging from Afrikaa Bambaataa to Vanilla Ice to the Beastie Boys to Grandmaster Flash to Dilated Peoples to Missy Elliott) together with a few non-hip-hop bands (Electric Six, Morris Day), plus a montage of soundbites from (real and fake) news broadcasts, interview tapes, and old low-budget SF movies (not to mention attacks on copyright law and exhortations in favor of piracy/sampling/remaking). (There’s a fairly complete list of sample sources here).

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Photo: Blown Away © Steve Steigman
Source:The Analog Dept.
(Text in Spanish only. To be translated to English.)

The seminar took place at
Cultural Center of Spain in Buenos Aires
Florida 943
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Presented on June 17 – 22, 2006
http://www.cceba.org.ar/tapa/tapa.pl
http://www.cceba.org.ar/evento/evento.pl?evento=363

Text Source: CCEBA

A big thanks to Gabriela Perez del Pulgar for taking, summarizing and revising the notes for publication. A very special thanks to Belen Gache and Gustavo Romano who organized the seminar.
———-

Resumen del taller

“El remix es un segundo mix de algo pre-existente, y el material que es mixeado por segunda vez necesita ser reconocido, de lo contrario, la obra podría ser entendida erróneamente como algo nuevo, se volvería plagio. Sin una historia, el remix no puede ser Remix.”

–EDUARDO NAVAS

Eduardo Navas, artista, historiador y escritor especializado en nuevos medios, compartió en este taller las líneas de investigación que actualmente realiza en torno al fenómeno de Remix Culture o Cultura Remix, presentando tanto sus propios trabajos como los de otros artistas y analizando los de los asistentes con el fin de reflexionar sobre la producción artística ligada a los nuevos medios y las implicaciones del remix en la cultura contemporánea.

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Click here for detailed image
(Source: Juno Records)

Artist:      ABSTRACT FUTURE
Title:     The First Theory
Label:     Magnolia Digital
Cat No:     MAG 008
Format:     192 mp3, 320 mp3, wav
Released:     19 September, 2006