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: icommons.org/
Text source: opendemocracy.net/

22 – 6 – 2006

The commons movement may be groundbreaking and innovative but as it hurtles towards a global model, it risks the privatisation of culture and a disregard for national boundaries, says David M Berry.
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Image source: static.flickr.com

Text source: www.archive.org/

1. “Help Me Help Me” – AllThatFall
2. “If You Make Your Bed in Heaven” – Roddy Schrock
3. “Leftover Secrets to Tell” – Pocka
4. “Secret Life Remix” – Stephane Leonard
5. “The Black Isle (Byrne/Eno Remix)” – (dj) morsanek
6. “Hit Me Somebody (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – MrBiggs
7. “Being and Nothingness (A Secret Life Remixed)” – john kannenberg
8. “Somebody Help Us” – My Fun
9. “Hey” – Mark Rushton
10. “My Bush in the Secret Life of Ghosts” – Prehab
11. “Not Enough Africa” – Ego Response Technician
12. “Helping (Help Me Somebody Remix)” – doogie
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Text source: http://www.techfest.org/workshops/remix/ 

Today we stand surrounded by a range and density of cultural materials. There are multiple sites of production of texts, images and sounds. These circulate with velocity through expanding and intricate networks of transmission. What is our relationship with this world of images and sounds; and what are the forms and practices that can bring us to appropriate and regenerate our own moments of insertion into these networks? What do we infringe on when we start inserting ourselves into these networks, and what possibilities do we create? Do we need remix?

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Image source: http://www.some-assembly-required.net/
Text source: http://creativecommons.org/weblog

December 7th, 2005

Note from source: This email is part of a weekly series written by Lawrence Lessig and others about the history and future of Creative Commons.
Creative Commons is a young organization. And while we’ve been more successful than I ever imagined we’d be, we’ve also made mistakes. Some of these mistakes we’ve corrected. Some I hope to persuade us to correct. But throughout the three years since our launch, we have worked hard to build a solid and sustainable infrastructure of freedoms for creators.

Along the way, we have picked up some critics. I don’t have the space here to address every criticism. In this email, I’ll talk about just two — one directed at our NonCommercial license option, and the other at two of CC’s non-core licenses. But I’ll continue this discussion next year in a new forum that we’ll launch just for this purpose. Mark Shuttleworth is my model here, and I will be a part of that discussion whenever I can.

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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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Birth of a Nation, Film still. Source: about.com

Text source: Colostate.edu

CCCC 2006

Latterrell defined her role in the panel by explaining her presentation is a collage and sampling of other voices so it is about remix as much as it is a remix. “Remix” is a modern metaphor for revision. She colored this point with examples of customized sneakers, the tuxedo t shirt, the tangelo, sprite remix, and my personal favorite, labradoodles. She then paired a quote by Emerson on quotation and originality with a remix of President Bush’s State of the Union address that reversed his intended meanings. The collage of images and quotes continues with animation of Office Space meets Super Friends in which Superman, Green Lantern, Batman and Robin talk about memos and office procedures in what Latterell called a “classic mash up” or sampling. Next she showed DJ Spooky’s “Rebirth of a Nation” which spoofed D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation by showing clansmen almost dancing to the technorhythms from both soundtrack and visual beats. Sampling, Latterell asserts, implies breakdown. Then she quoted Johndan Johnson-Eilola from his book, Datacloud: Toward a New Theory of Online Work where he asserts breakdown and further discussion as the essence of remix. Latterell concluded with the idea that Lawrence Lessig asserted at last year’s conference—everything in life is remix.
James Porter, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use”

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Note: Archived for the way the concept of Remix is used to reconsider film.

Image source: movieimage.tripod.com
Text source: freeculturenyu.org

The Project

The basic idea is to turn all of the footage from that one trilogy into a 5-8 minute short film. We will then screen your parody on the internet and in real life at the end of April of 2006.

Choosing “The Matrix”, one would take all three installments, The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and The Matrix Revolutions and edit down that footage into a parody of the original, adding or removing elements (voiceovers, scenes, etc) as necessary. You could even use only one of the films of the trilogy– the point is that the original footage of The Matrix is being used to make a short parody out of it.
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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…)