Shuffle from Plunderphonia – “Chris Cutler” remixed by < DJ Balli >

TEXT BETWEEN “ “ IS FROM CHRIS CUTLER’S NOTORIOUS ESSAY ON PLUNDERPHONICS, TEXT BETWEEN < > ARE UPDATES TO THE TEXT FROM DJ BALLI OR OTHERS QUOTED.

<SONIC SEX REASSIGNMENT CLINIC>

“Sounds like” <a Sex Reassignment Surgery in action>” as a” <pitch modified turntable -∞!!!> “slows rapidly to settle into a recognisable, slightly high-pitched Dolly Parton” (<the augmented sex organ!>). “It continues to slow down <∞> but more gradually now. The instruments thicken” <does this refer to genital reconstruction procedures??> “and their timbres stretch” <removal of the breast…> “and grow richer” <..shaping of a male contoured chest>. “Details unheard at the right speed” <previous gender> “suddenly cut across the” <new body> “sound. Dolly is changing sex, she’s a man already “<clitoris enlarged by pitch fader/androgenic hormones>; “the backing has become hallucinatory and strange. The grain of the song” <persona> “is opened up and the ear, seduced by detail, lets a throng of surprising associations and ideas fall in behind it<s mutated sexual identity>. “The same thing is suddenly very different. Who would have expected this extraordinary composition to have been buried in a generic country song, one thousand times heard already and one thousand times copied and forgotten?” <Let’s go deeper into S.R.S. female to male procedure:
_Mastectomy (see above);
_Hysterectomy/transplant of metallic hi-hat;
_Ovarectomy/transplant of gastric bass;
_olpectomy/transplant of dark synth-line;
_preparing a free forearm-flap (including vessels and nerves) with microsurgical technique/transplant of mid-tempo, di- storted amen-breaks (this rhythmic pattern introduce the main beat. See next);
_creating a phallus from that flap, including both a fully functional neo-urethra and a glans/transplant of old-school 4/4 kick 180 bpm including delay on the attack and release of the beat);
_covering the forearm-flap-area with skin from the mastec tomy procedure/enriching the gabba beat with a multitude of vst effects;
_preservation of the clitoris on the base of the phallus in order to be stimulated and so to mantain the ability to have an orgasm post-operatively/ maximization of the kick in order to be more empathic and mash the dancefloor up! Here you have Dolly Parton raving, going mad on the Hakken>.

“So I hear” <the country-gabba bootleg remix of> “John Oswald’s version of Dolly Parton’s version of The Great Pretender, effectively a recording of” <solid bass-drum, high-pitched hi-hat, dark synth-line and warming up amen breaks on> “Oswald playing Parton’s single once through, transformed via varispeed media (first a high speed cassette duplicator, then an infinitely variable speed turntable, finally a hand-controlled reel-to-reel tape – all seamlessly edited together). Apart from the economy of this single procedure of controlled deceleration, which is, as it were, played by Oswald, no modifications have been made to the original recording”. <In addition to the transplant of main kick, a variety of sound editing mentioned in previous < > has been made to the recording so that the illegal remix can be considered a new sonic body. This mutated sexual identity though still holds back here and there details of previous gender. A similar relationship is the one established between original recording, plundered version and remix>. “When ‘the same thing’ is so different that it constitutes a new thing, it isn’t ‘the same thing’ anymore – even if, like Oswald’s hearing of the Dolly Parton record, it manifestly is the ‘same thing’ and no other”. [The bootleg or illegal remix as mentioned earlier is a remix of a song, almost exclusively in the electronic dance music genre, in which the remixing DJ uses an entire song or samples from a song without the explicit permission of the original artist. A kind of Sex Reassignment Surgery not requested by the patient? Commonly in the mainstream EDM world this practice expresses great respect and appreciation towards the original song. More interesting for our “SURGICAL CLINIC” aim of audio-social incision is maybe the breed of sonic Frankenstein created by mutilating and dissecting commercial pop music. This kind of surgery is performed in order to make fun of the “music industry” and, ultimately, to destroy it by infecting and raping its commodified paraphernalia. Furthermore, in some specific case it can also have some political significance: take for example homophobic ragga and mix it together with some queer propaganda in order to radically alter its original message. The result can have some subversive relevance. But the operation like always in medicine is not 100% succesfull (not even 50% in this specific case): “Thus it come as no surprise that so much mainstream pop is sampled these days – what is supposed to be ironic is essentialy affirmative towards the music industry. It’s desperate bid for acceptance, for commercial success” (Praxis newsletter, September 2005). Historically this is more or less what happened with British remixers DNA> “who made a techno manipulation of Susanne Vega’s song Tom’s Diner, released it on an independent label, sold a few thousand copies and then, when Vega’s record company heard it, were offered not a crippling lawsuit but a deal for an ‘official’ release.” <Getting back to our patient Dolly Parton>
“However, although the source is plainly fixed and given, the choice, treatment and reading of this source are all highly conscious products of Oswald’s own intention and skill. So much so indeed that it is easy to argue that the piece, although ‘only’ Parton’s record, undoubtedly forms, in Oswald’s version, a self-standing composition with its own structure and logic – both of which are profoundly different from those of the original. Oswald’s Pretender would still work for a listener who had never heard the Parton version, and in a way the Parton version never could. Though the Parton version is, of course, given – along with and against the plundered version. What Oswald has created – created because the result of his work is something startlingly new – is a powerful, aesthetic, significant, polysemic but highly focused and enjoyable sound artefact; both a source of direct listening pleasure and (for our purposes) a persuasive case for the validity and eloquence of its means”<I’d say all this can work also for the bootleg remix>

“John Oswald’s Pretender and other pieces – all originated from existing copyright recordings but employing radically different techniques – were included on an EP and later a CD, Plunderphonic (Oswald 1988). Both were given away free to radio stations and the press. None was sold. The liner note reads: ‘This disc may be reproduced but neither it, nor any reproductions of it, are to be bought or sold. Copies are available only to public access and broadcast organisations, including libraries, radio or periodicals.’ The 12” EP, consisting of four pieces – Pretender (Parson), Don’t (Presley), Spring (Stravinsky), Pocket (Basie) – was made between 1979 and 1988 and released in May 1988, with some support from the Arts Council of Canada. The CD, containing these and 20 other pieces realised between 1979-89, was released on October 31st 1989 and was financed entirely by Oswald himself. Between Christmas Eve 1989 and the end of January 1990, all distribution ceased and all extant copies were destroyed. Of all the plundered artists it was Michael Jackson who pursued the CD to destruction. Curiously Jackson’s own plundering, for instance the one minute and six seconds of The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth which opens Jackson’s Will You Be There? on the CD Dangerous, for which Jackson claims no less than six credits, including composer copyright (adding plagiarism to sound piracy), seems to have escaped his notice”.
<Will You Be There was the subject of two lawsuits. The first was for copyright infringement of the Cleveland Orchestra’s recording and lack of credit to Beethoven for the use of his symphonic prelude. The suit was filed by the Cleveland Orchestra for 7 million dollars and was settled out of court. Subsequent printings of Dangerous the album featuring the above-mentioned hit have included full credits in the album booklet. The second lawsuit was a claim of plagiarism by Italian songwriter Albano Carrisi who claimed that Will You Be There was copied from his song I Cigni di Balaka (The Swans of Balaka). After seven years, an Italian court ruled in favor of Albano Carrisi because Michael failed to show up to court. In a follow-up case some months later, the Court ruled in favor of Michael and rejected the claim, stating that while the two songs were very similar, they both may have been inspired by the Ink Spots 1939 hit Bless You for Being an Angel>.

 

<TURNTABLIZATION OF THE WORLD>

“On the one hand, recording technology offers control of musical parameters beyond even the wildest dreams of the most radical mid-20th century composer; on the other, it terminally threatens the deepest roots of the inherited art music paradigm, replacing notation with the direct transcription of performances and rendering the clear distinction between performance and composition null”.” Of all the processes and productions which have emerged from the new medium of recording, plunderphonics is the most consciously self-reflexive; it begins and ends only with recordings, with the already played”.”As an attribute unique to recording, the history of plunderphonics is in part the history of the self-realisation of the recording process”;”Sound recording began with experiments in acoustics and the discovery that different pitches and timbres of sound could be rendered visible, most notably in 1865 by Leon Scott de Martinville attaching a stylus to a membrane, causing the membrane to vibrate with a sound and allowing it to engrave its track on a glass cylinder coated with lampblack moving at a fixed speed. Such experiments were conducted only to convert otherwise invisible, transient sound into a ‘writing’ (phono-graph means ‘voice-writer’), a fixed visible form that would allow it to be seen and studied. It was some ten years before it occurred to anyone that by simply reversing the process, the sound thus written might be recovered. And it wasn’t until the late 1870s that the first, purely mechanical phonograph was constructed, without clear purpose, speculatively appearing as a novelty item, talking doll mechanism and ‘dictaphone’. The music gramophone really started to take hold after the electrification of the whole process in 1926, but the breakthrough for the record as a producing (as opposed to reproducing) medium, came only in 1948 in the studios of French Radio with the birth of musique concrète. There were no technological advances to explain this breakthrough, only a thinking advance; the chance interpenetrations of time, place and problematic. The first concrète pieces, performed at the Concert de Bruits in Paris by engineer/composer Pierre Schaeffer, were made by manipulating gramophone records in real time, employing techniques embedded in their physical form: varying the speed, reversing the direction of spin, making ‘closed grooves’ to create repeated ostinati etc”.
“Other composers <in addition to Pierre Schaeffer, head of the Groupe de musique concrète who composed this “Study of a turntable” in 1948> began to experiment with disc manipulation around the same time, including Tristam Cary in London and Mauricio Kagel in Buenos Aires”. “Where the gramophone was an acoustic instrument, the magnetic recorder, also invented at the end of the nineteenth century, was always electrical. The gramophone, however, had numerous initial advantages: it was easier to amplify (the energy of the recoverable signal was greater to start with), and as soon as Emile Berliner replaced the cylinder with the disc and developed a process to press copies from a single master (1895), records were easy to mass produce”. “The vinyl disc meanwhile held its place as the principle commercial playback medium and thus the ubiquitous public source of recorded sound. This division between the professionally productive and socially reproductive media was to have important consequences, since it was on the gramophone record that music appeared in its public, most evocative form; and when resonant cultural fragments began to be taken into living sound art, it was naturally from records, from the ‘real’ artefacts that bricoleurs would draw”.” Yet strangely it waited 25 years for John Cage in his Imaginary Landscape No.1 (1939) to bring a gramophone record into a public performance as an instrument – and he still only used test tones and the effect of speed changes. Having said this, I recently learned that at a Dada event in 1920 Stephan Wolpe used eight gramophones to play records at widely different speeds simultaneously – a true precedent, but without consequences; and of course Ottorino Respighi did call for a gramophone recording of a nightingale in his 1924 Pina di Roma – a technicality this, but imaginative none the less (though a bird call would have sufficed). Moreover, Darius Milhaud (from 1922), László Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus (1923) and Edgard Varese (1936) had all experimented with disc manipulation, but none eventually employed them in a final work. Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch did produce three recorded ‘studies’ (Grammophonmusik, 1929-30), but these have been lost, so it is difficult to say much about them except that, judging from the absence of offspring, their influence was clearly small”.”It wasn’t until 1961 that an unequivocal exposition of plunderphonic techniques arrived in James Tenney’s celebrated Collage No.1 (Blue Suede) (Tenney 1992), a manipulation of Elvis Presley‘s hit record Blue Suede Shoes. The gauntlet was down; Tenney had picked up a ‘non art’, lowbrow work and turned it into ‘art’; not as with scored music by writing variations on a popular air, but simply by subjecting a gramophone record to various physical and electrical procedures”.
“The term ‘scratching’ was coined to describe the practice of the realtime manipulation of 12 inch discs on highly adapted turntables. It grew up in US discos where DJs began to programme the records they played, running them together, cutting one into another on beat and in key, superimposing, crossfading and so on. Soon this developed to the point where a good DJ could play records as an accompanying or soloing instrument, along with a rhythm box, other tracks or singing. New and extended techniques emerged – for instance the rhythmic slipping of a disc to and fro rapidly by hand on a low friction mat to create rhythms and cross rhythms – alongside old Concrete techniques: controlled speed alterations and sillons fermés riffs.
Two manual decks and a rhythm box is all you need. Get a bunch of good rhythm records, choose your favourite parts and groove along with the rhythm machine. Using your hands, scratch the record by repeating the grooves you dig so much. Fade one record into the other and keep that rhythm box going. Now start talking and singing over the record with your own microphone. Now you’re making your own music out of other people’s records. That’s what scratching is. (McLaren (1982)).
It was only after scratching had become fashionable in the mid-1970s in radical black disco music that it moved back toward art applications, adopted quite brilliantly by Christian Marclay. Marclay used all the above techniques and more, incorporating also an idea of Milan Knizac’s, who had been experimenting since 1963 with deliberately mutilated discs, particularly composite discs comprising segments of different records glued together. Of course everything Marclay does (like Knizac) is 100% plundered, but on some recordings he too, like John Oswald on his seminal Plunderphonic recordings, creates works which, echoing Tenney and Trythall, concentrate on a single artist, thus producing a work which is about an artist and made only from that artist’s sonic simulacrum. Listen, for instance, to the Maria Callas and Jimi Hendrix tracks on the 10 inch EP More Encores (subtitled ‘Christian Marclay plays with the records of Louis Armstrong, Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg, John Cage, Maria Callas, Frederic Chopin, Martin Denney, Arthur Ferrante & Louis Teicher, Fred Frith, Jimi Hendrix, Christian Marclay, Johann Strauss, John Zorn’). Marclay rose to prominence as a member of the early 1980s New York scene, on the experimental fringe of what was still thought of unequivocally as low art. He emerged from the context of disco and scratching, not concrète or other artworld experiments with discs (though they were part of his personal history). His cultural status (like the status of certain other alumni of the New York school such as John Zorn) slowly shifted, from low to high, via gallery installations and visual works and through the release of records such as Record Without A Cover (1985), which has only one playable side (the other has titles and text pressed into it) and comes unwrapped with the instruction: ‘Do not store in a protective package’. Or the 1987 grooveless LP, packaged in a black suede pouch and released in a limited and signed edition of 50 by Ecart Editions. Marclay’s work appears as a late flowering of an attenuated and, even at its height, marginal high art form, reinvented and reinvigorated by low art creativity. It traces the radical inter-penetrations of low and high art in the levelling age of sound recording; the swing between high art experiment, low art creativity and high art reappropriation, as the two approach one another until, at their fringes, they become indistinguishable. This aesthetic levelling is a property of the medium and this indistinguishability signals not a collapse but the coming into being of a new aesthetic form.

Oswald plays records. Curiously, the apotheosis of the record as an instrument – as the raw material of a new creation – occurred just as the gramophone record itself was becoming obsolete and when a new technology that would surpass the wildest ambitions of any scratcher, acousmaticist, tape composer or sound organiser was sweeping all earlier record/playback production systems before it. Sampling, far from destroying disc manipulation, seems to have breathed new life into it. Turntable techniques live on in live House and Techno. Marclay goes from strength to strength, more credits for ‘turntables’ appear on divers CDs and younger players like Otomo Yoshihide are emerging with an even more organic and intimate relation to the record/player as an expressive instrument.
It is almost as if sampling had recreated the gramophone record as a craft instrument, an analogue, expressive voice, made authentic by nostalgia. Obsolescence empowers a new mythology for the old phonograph, completing the circle from passive repeater to creative producer, from dead mechanism to expressive voice, from the death of performance to its guarantee. It is precisely the authenticity of the 12 inch disc that keeps it in manufacture; it has become anachronistically indispensable”. <
In 1965 Knížák began creating broken music by damaging gramophone records, scraping them, sticking tape on them, applying paint, burning, breaking them, gluing fragments of different records together, playing them and recording the results. New recordings created in this manner were issued as vinyl records as early as the 1970s, in several editions of Broken Music. This is how he refers to his work:”In 1963–64 I started playing records either at slow speed or at high speed and, in so doing changing the quality of the music, creating my own other music. In 1965 I began destroying records: scratching them, puncturing them, breaking them. Playing them – which ruined the needles and sometimes the whole record player – created a whole new type of music, one that was surprising, jarring, aggressive and funny. Songs could last for just a brief moment or, if the needle got stuck in a deep scratch, practically forever, the same passage playing over and over. I developed this method even further. I started gluing records together, painting them, burning them, cutting and pasting parts of different records together and so on, in order to achieve the greatest variety of sounds. Later I began working in the same way with complete scores. I deleted some notes, keys and other symbols, or entire bars (in this way dictating the rhythm), redrew the notes and keys, changed the tempo, and the like. I also changed the sequence of the bars, played compositions in reverse, turned whole rows upside down, pasted together the most diverse parts of various scores, and so on. I also used collections of popular songs or other pieces as scores for orchestral compositions. Each instrument or section or group plays one song. The resulting sound, where everyone keeps the tempo, intonation and length of the particular piece that they are playing, creates a new symphony. And of course there were other similar approaches, combinations and offshoots. Since music created from playing destroyed records cannot be written down in notes or in other language (or only with great difficulty), the records themselves can also be considered as the notation.” (from Milan Knížák, Novy Raj, Selection of Works 1952-1995, Prague: Galerie Mánes, 1996; translated from Czech by Andre Swoboda) more (in Czech).

Broken Music DISCOGRAPHY (1979)

_Milan Knizak 1979 Broken Music
Composition No. 1, 18’56” OGG
Composition No. 2, 3’27” OGG
Composition No. 3, 4’25” OGG
Composition No. 4, 10’23” OGG
Composition No. 5, 13’52” OGG
Originally released in 1979 on Multhipla Records.
Reissue released on Ampersand ‎– ampere12, CD, 2002
Curated and Assembled By – Walter Marchetti
Reissue Direction – Dawson Prater
Edited at Harpo’s Bazaar (Bologna, Italy)

_Milan Knizac self-released tape c60, Germany. Dedicated to Wolfgang Becker, with hand painted sleeve by Milan Knizak. This cassette was a part of an exhibition in 1981.

_Milan Knizak 1983 Broken Music
Untitled (Side A), 28’35” OGG
Untitled (Side B), 32’04” OGG
Label – Edition Hundertmark, 1983
Format – Carton box including a C-60 cassette of Knizak’s Destroyed Music, signed and hand-numbered 1 to 40, a partially melted, hand-painted and signed 7” record, and 2 sheets of information text.
Cassette was also released separately in an edition of 60, signed but unnumbered copies.
_Milan Knizak 1989 Broken Music
Details, 28’35” OGG
Label – Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, 1989
Format – Flexi-disc, Single Sided, 33 ⅓ RPM

 

<MA$H-UP & PLAY!>

“For young musicians growing up in the electric recording age, immersed in this shoreless sea of available sound, electronics, Maltese folk music, bebop, rhythm and blues, show tunes, film soundtracks and the latest top ten hit were all equally on tap. Tastes, interests, studies could be nourished at the pace and following the desire of the listener. Sounds, techniques and styles could flit across genres as fast as you could change a record, tune a dial or analyse and imitate what you heard. A kind of sound intoxication arose”.<And if you consider Chris Cutler was referring to a pre-immaterial music age (presumably the 80ies?), what can be said about the sonic intoxication nowadays?!?

Afro-ebm, audio-meme, neo rave mazurka, urban nihilism, post industrial funk, drum’n’noize, retro-electro/electro-retrò/electretroelectretro, drone’n’roll, power-ragga, death-samba, poltergeist dub, skacid, armageddon-electro, crossbreed, atmospheric speedcore, no-step, dub spencer & trance hill, alkaemic trance, 1 bit music, drill’n’polka, anoise, intelligent gabber, schrill-step, sdm (stupid dance music), no-core, advanced hip hop, robot-ragga, industrial moombahton, trival, speed reggae, 4 bit riddim, cumbia’n’bass, latin ethereal, hard zenonesque, spaghetti terror, martialreggaetone, balkan ambient, Mc PavaRotten horrorcore, occult death rap, christian harsh wall noise, (h)ip[ic]-hop, grind batucada, onkyobilly, ghetto no-input mixer, down tempo j-core, snap music, boogie schranz, bassline extravaganza, a cappella extratone, fourth world crust, dodecaphonic posse, fingers snapping, gnam gnam style da camera, avant soul, salsa e meringhe, oi eurodance, micromusic da pogo, space doo-wop, future garage, witch house vs tekno dei puffi, lounge dark jazz, new jack swing, progressive swing, crunkcore, ritual grime, goth flamenco, wasabi blues, b&r, rhythm’n’chill, mafioso rap, juggalo gospel, pvc (power violence capoeira), screamo folk, uk bossanova, kebap minimal, acid beatboxing, nu liscio, #seapunk, trap rap, mutant country music, psychedelic chiptune, juke anche chiamata footwork, booty ambient, miami baile, tropical metal, low-fi afrobeat, fidget house, complextro, kuduro, tribal hop, glitch batida, abstract soca, dubstep rondo’, skweee, glam tech, emo electroclash, kraut-bubblegum, jawaiian, bolero new romantic, concrete tango, cockgaze, manouche, bruitisme, klezmer gabba, merenrap, wonky, apolkalypso, apocalypso disco.

The way music consumption is organised online today goes, ontologically we can say, towards mash-up. Just think about interface of mainstream djing software like Traktor Scratch Pro or Virtual DJ with their options to SYNC all different styles of music. Not to mention, features from Ableton Live or Acid pro such as beat-mapping (a technique which simplifies the synchronization of samples of different tempos) and online previewing (allowing the composer to audition a sample, playing at the right pitch and tempo, alongside their existing composition) that made it easy for many people with musical ability but little professional studio experience to knock together new combinations in a fraction of the time it would take with traditional tools, such as the magnetic tape John Oswald slaved over in their early days. Also for some years now we can get for 39$ (and hopefully can hack for free!) this MashUp 2 software that enables you to create your mash-ups. In the words of the developers/sellers of the programme: “We had a simple idea. We wanted to create our mashups in 5 minutes or less, but there was no easy way to do it. We created Mashup software to help you beatmatch tracks and save your results to new audio files. It’s like an ultra-fast audio editor with professional-quality beatmatching.

Here is what you can do:
_Add an acapella to an instrumental track
_Play several tracks at once, and create a fluid mashup between them
_Create a chillout version of a song by deleting segments that have drums
_Extend the song and add a good intro beat for easier mixing in Traktor and Serato
_Create a mixtape with your favorite music, and save it as one continuous mix
_Make a radio show or podcast entirely in our Mashup software
Mashup software helps you create 100% harmonically-compatible mashups and will eliminate key clashes. MashUp has been nominated best dj tool of the Year by DJ MAG.” In a world in which justapoxition has become a technical option in some menu of a software program, is there any room left for this concept, derived directly from the last century’s historical avantgarde, as a tool of subversion?

Certainly to insist on the purity of a certain style doesn’t count as any possible way forward. This was somehow kind of accepted unanimously in the ‘90s “a new era of nuclear fission of previously separate or even opposed genres in electronic dance music. On the one hand, we have the unbearable conservatorism of people holding on to the traditional formula of the 4/4 beat trad electro and pure jungle, while on the other we have the impure combining of elements from those genres to something heterogenous and new, an attack on the petrified and poor values of the past”. (Praxis Newsletter, 12). Utmost adhesion to a certain music genre is somehow out of fashion even in mainstream EDM in such a way that paradoxically we would sympathize with it if it was not for the dodgy identitarian consequences following from it. But this is another matter. Getting back to MA$H UP & PLAY, the idea of a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another is something that got radically normalized in the year 2000 in the US. “Bastard pop” is maybe the best term to define this genre since it explicitly refer to its commercial appeal. In fact, mash-up as the new century introduced it to us is nothing more than a sort of “cubed up spectacle”. By legally paying samples from Nirvana guitars to combine them with, legally obtained, vocals from Salt’n’Peppa you extend your chance of success in the hit parade. Good luck, remember us when you’ll be rich and famous!
Copyright Act of 1976:
_Lists the rights of copyright holders in the United States, including several copyright provision amendments. It became a law in October 1976 and was implemented in January 1978
_Mashup artists are permitted to remake an original song as long as the new song is substantially similar to the original song. In turn, the mashup artist must pay the original artist $0.94 for every copy of the song they sell for a profit
_Asking permission to use the song is not required, as long as payment is made. So the original artist and his mashup- per mate can go out together and happily do coke spon- sored by International Copyright Association.

But even when there’s no legal payment, any element of subversion is pretty hard to spot. Considering the “transformative” nature of original content bootlegs can find protection from copyright claims under the “fair use” doctrine of copyright law. According to this, there are 4 factors a piece of work being considered for infringement: Purpose and character of the use; Nature of the work being used; Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the whole; Effect on the market for the original. This said, the sound of the average “fair use” mash-upper is simply not fucked-up and distorted enough to be considered an insult to commercial music. (it is indeed boring and unable to rock the dancefloor). >

 

<PLUNDERPHONICS WORLD GUINNES RECORDS or the OLYMPICS of music built stealing as much sounds as possible from other records>

 

GOLD MEDAL: “THE FLYING SAUCER”, BUCHANON AND GOODMAN (Part I & II) (1956) [Single]
Facts: The original Novelty/Break-in record, involved questions from B&G, and answers from snatches of Rock/Pop/R&B songs. Reached #3 on the Billboard charts in August 1956. B&G were sued by over thirty record companies for the use of their (the companies’) signed artists’ material on this sketch! However, the judge ruled that B&G’s work was a “burlesque” (thus, a new work of their own). The judge also ruled that B&G’s work would NOT hurt the sales of the artists’ records they used (it may have even helped some)! Thus, B&G kept making these sketches, since burlesques (and parodies, satire, etc.) are protected by The U.S. Constitution. Due to the success of the record, The Penguins, who had changed labels, re-recorded “Earth Angel” and released it again.
EXCERPTS FROM THE LYRICS:
Buchanan: We interrupt this record to bring you a special bulletin. The reports of a flying saucer hovering over the city have been confirmed. The flying saucers are real!
Radio: Too real, when I feel, what my heart can’t conceal… (from the Platters’ “The Great Pretender”)
Buchanan: That was the Clatters’ recording, “Too Real!”
And that set the pattern. Goodman would interview eyewitnesses about the spaceship, whose responses were the lyrics of popular songs.
Goodman: This is John Cameron Cameron downtown. Pardon me madam, would you tell our audience what would you do if the saucer were to land?
Witness: Duck back in the alley (from Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally”)
Goodman: Thank you. And now the thin gentleman there.
Witness: What I’m gonna do … is hard to tell (from Fats Domino’s “Poor Me”)
Goodman: And the gentleman with the guitar, what would you do sir?
Witness: Just take a walk down Lonely Street (from Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”)
The record continues. While the flying saucer landed on Earth, Buchanan and Goodman greeted its arrival with more splices, in-jokes and primitive technical wizardry.
Goodman: This is John Cameron Cameron on the spot. And now I believe we’re about to hear the words of the first spaceman ever to land on earth.
Martian: “A WOP BOP A LOO MOP A LOP BAM BOOM” (from Little Richard’s “Tutti-Frutti”)
Goodman: The impact of seeing the first spaceman has this reporter reeling!
Radio: Here I go reeling, ohh-oh (skip) ohh-oh (skip) ohh-oh (from the Platters’ “The Magic Touch”)
Buchanan: That was the Clatters again, with their big one, “Uh-Oh!”
Goodman: Gathered around me are several of the spacemen. Tell us – have you come to conquer the world?
Martian: esnefed fo yraterces
Goodman: And now would you repeat that in English?
Martian: Don’t want the world to have and hold… (from Don Cherry’s “Band of Gold”)

 

SILVER MEDAL: “U2”, NEGATIVLAND (SEELAND RECORDS 1991)

2014 Negativland is back giving away for remixing a multitrack-master of somebody else’s records, eh eh eh.

Hal Stakke, Legal Counsel/Seeland Records
In Memoriam, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem (27 April 1932 – 15 June 2014): Negativland releases “U2” tracks for remixing and reuse.
One of the most beloved voices in music radio, Kemal Amin “Casey” Kasem, died on Father’s Day 2014 after a long illness, and also a very public family squabble over his continuing care. Negativland pays tribute to this broadcasting legend by reaching into its vaults and presenting what is perhaps Kasem’s best-known work, on Negativland’s long-unavailable “U2” maxi-single, offering up for public consumption (and now, for creative reuse) what has been hidden from view for 23 years.
In 1991, Negativland’s “U2” single had one of the shortest releases in music history, squashed like a bug after less than ten days on store shelves, under legal fire from the Irish rock band U2’s music publisher (Warner/Chappell) and then-record label (Island). The history of this fracas was detailed in Negativland’s  book and CD release Fair Use: The Letter U and the Numeral 2 (Seeland 013).
Now, instead of merely reissuing the ‘U2’ record itself, Negativland presents, for free digital download, the original un-mixed studio multi-track tape for re-mixing, re-purposing and re-inventing in whichever way the listener may choose. Negativland encourages the re-contextualization of this seminal work for whatever reason, whatsoever. In keeping with the working methods and philosophy of Negativland, and the Fair Use provision in U.S. Copyright Law (Section 107), the group offers up this raw material in the hopes that entirely new versions of the work are created and disseminated.
Listeners/remixers are encouraged to post their creations in these locations: and . The original record as briefly released in 1991 may be heard via the band’s website or via YouTube.
Negativland is a San Francisco Bay Area based group which has been making music and collage since 1980, releasing more than 25 albums on CD and LP on their own Seeland record label. Their newest work, It’s All In Your Head, a long-form ‘collage documentary’ about belief in God, will be released on Seeland in October.

 

BRONZE MEDAL: “ENDTRODUCING”, DJ SHADOW (MO’WAX, 1996).

Album almost entirely composed by sampled content. Here’s a detailed list of the sources:

TRACK 1) “Best Foot Forward” (0:49) samples from
“It’s My Turn” by Stezo
“Real Deal” by Lifer’s Group
“He’s My DJ” by Sparky Dee featuring DJ Red Alert
“Poison” by Kool G. Rap and DJ Polo
“Dynamite” by Masters of Ceremony
“Cold Chillin’ in the Spot” by Jazzy Jay featuring Russell Simmons
“Do or Die Bed-Stuy” by Divine Sounds
“Party’s Gettin’ Rough” by Beastie Boys
“You Can’t Stop the Prophet” by Jeru the Damaja
“Concerto for Jazz/Rock Orchestra, Part 2” by Stanley Clarke

TRACK 2) “Building Steam With a Grain of Salt” (6:40) samples from
“I Worship You” by Lexia
“I Need You” by H.P. Riot
“I Feel a New Shadow” by Jeremy Storch
“Soul Food” by Frankie Seay and the Soul Riders
“Planetary Motivations (Cancer)” by Mort Garson
“George Marsh on Drums: Interviewed by Terry McGovern” from the LP Music Makers Percussion, released by the Chevron/Standard Oil Company
of California

TRACK 3) “The Number Song” (4:40) samples from
“아름다운 인형(Get Ready)” by He 6
“Orion” Metallica
“Breakdown” T La Rock
“AJ Scratch” Kurtis Blow
“Quit Jive’in” Pearly Queen
“Baby Don’t Cry” The Third Guitar
“Sexy Coffee Pot” Tony Alvon and the Belairs
“Back to the Hip-Hop” The Troubleneck Brothers
“Bad Luck” by Don Covay and the Lemon Blues Band
“Can I Kick It? (Spirit Mix)” A Tribe Called Quest
“Who Got the Number” Pigmeat Markham and the B.Y.
“Fantastic Freaks at the Dixie” DJ Grand Wizard Theodore e Fantastic Five
“Corruption is the Thing” Creations Unlimited
“Flash It to the Beat” Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
“Freelance” Grandmaster Flash
“Been Had” Sapo
“8 Counts for Rita” Jimmy Smith

TRACK 4) “Changeling” (7:17) samples from
Soft Shell” Motherlode
“Klondyke Netti” Embryo
“Invisible Limits” Tangerine Dream
“Imagination Flight” the Chaffey College Jazz Ensemble
“Touching Souls” and “Inner Mood I” Kay Gardner
“The Man Who Couldn’t Cry” Loudon Wainwright III
“Here Comes the Meterman” The Meters

TRACK 5) “Transmission 1” (0:35) samples from
Audio from the film ‘Il signore del male’
Dialogue from the film ‘2002: la seconda odissea’

TRACK 6) “What Does Your Soul Look like? part.4” (5:08) samples from
“The Vision and the Voice, Part 1 – The Vision” Flying Island
“Monica” The People’s People
“Numbers” Kraftwerk

TRACK 7) “Untitled” (0:24) samples from Grey Boy” Human Race

TRACK 8) “Stem/Long Stem” (7:48) samples from
“Love Suite” Nirvana
“Tears” Giorgio Moroder
“Linde Manor” Dennis Linde
“Freedom” Murray Roman
“Variazione III” Osanna
“Blues So Bad” The Mystic Number National Bank
“Oleo Strut” Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company
“Moshitup” Just-Ice featuring KRS-One
Background synthesizers from the film ‘Blade Runner’
“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” Led Zeppelin

TRACK 9) “Transmission 2” (1:29) samples from
“The Human Abstract” David Axelrod
“The Madness Subsides” Pekka Pohjola
“Dolmen Music” Meredith Monk
Audio from the film ‘Il signore del male’

TRACK 10) “Mutual Slump” (4:02) samples from
“Possibly Maybe” Björk
“Love, Love, Love” Pugh Rogefeldt
“More Than Seven Dwarfs in Penis-Land” Roger Waters and Ron Geesin

TRACK 11) “Organ Donor” (1:57) samples from
“Tears” Giorgio Moroder
“Someone” Tim and Bill
“There’s a DJ in Your Town” Samson and Delilah

TRACK 12) “Why hip hop sucks ‘96” (0:43) samples from
“There’s a DJ in Your Town” Samson and Delilah
“Snap” Cleo McNett

TRACK 13) “Midnight in a Perfect World” (4:57) samples from
“Outta State” Akinyele
“Sower of Seeds” Baraka
“California Soul” Marlena Shaw
“The Human Abstract” David Axelrod
“Sekoilu seestyy” (The Madness Subsides) Pekka Pohjola
“Dolmen Music” and “Biography” Meredith Monk
“Releasing Hypnotical Gases” Organized Konfusion
“Life Could” Rotary Connection

TRACK 14) “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain” (9:23) samples from
“‘Pon a Hill” T. Rex
“Walk on “ from Jo Ann Garrett
Dialogue from the film ‘The Aurora Encounter’
“Moment of Truth/Ghetto Shakedown” Charles Bernstein
“A Funky Kind of Thing” Billy Cobham
“Let the Homicides Begin” Top Priority featuring Percy P
“Space Odyssey – 2001” The Daly-Wilson Big Band
“Soul Brother’s Testify” Chester Randle’s Original Soul Sender’s
“Fun and Funk (Part II)” The Fantastic Epic’s

TRACK 15) “What Does Your Soul Look Like – part.1 Blue Sky revisit” (6:17) samples from
“All Our Love” by Shawn Phillips
“Joe Splivingates” by David Young
Voice of Michele Zarrillo
“Nucleus” by The Alan Parsons Project
“Voice of the Saxophone” by The Heath Brothers

TRACK 16) “Transmission 3” (1:11) samples from
Audio from the film ‘Prince of Darkness’
Voice of the character The Giant from the episode “Lonely Souls” of the TV series ‘Twin Peaks.