For the past three years, Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series has been quietly building an arsenal of some of the most interesting collaborations available on wax. They’ve teamed up their Blue Series Continuum jazz band with innovative rappers, producers, and musicians including Antipop Consortium, El-P, DJ Wally, Saul Williams, Meat Beat Manifesto, and DJ Spooky, among many others. The results are neither Hip-hop nor Jazz, but ride the lines between those and several other genres. Continue reading “The Blue Series from Thirsty Ear”
war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music
We live in a realm where once clear boundaries have been reformed, pushed back, reconfigured, and often blurred beyond recognition. The age-old stable image of photography — once considered by most as a reliable visual representation of some brief slice of reality — is now suspect due to digital editing techniques. The same fate has fallen on film, the word, and music of all kinds.Whereas modernism adheres to the idea that there exists but one real “truth,” postmodernism sees all things shifting according to perspective. It finds no central truth, only changing points of view. As we will see through the course of this essay, the commodification of music has gone through a similar change — from a stable central authority to myriad shifting forms.
Where all of the aforementioned forms used to come down to the public from one source, like the divine word of God, or the idea of one central “truth,” the digital now allows most anyone to create, recreate and distort coded information of all kinds. In the music of the marketplace, the center of power was the record company. The decree was the packaged product — the record album, the cassette tape, and the compact disc.
Band of the Hand
Twenty or so years ago, the Hip-hop DJ emerged as a vigilante on this landscape of music as commodity. While remixing and recontextualizing the product, he decentralized the power of the record company. DJs break the code. They reorganize the power structure in the world of sound. The product is no longer the be-all, end-all, but just another piece of the new story. The center does not hold:
The DJ cultivates and manages singularities: the bifurcation points on the edge of chaos, where dynamical systems manifest their emergent properties and transcend the sum of their elements. The speakers emit alchemical sounds, cut and pasted by needles in deep grooves, manipulated by human hands on black wax. It is a pastiche of ever-shifting, hand-engineered, sonic references. The dialectic of the two turntables unfolds in time. Beats juggled for the meat jungle. Scratches snatched for the daily catch. Crowd control, cruise control, remote control, the discotheque as Panopticon: A command-control system with the DJ at the helm. Several systems work at odds and in conjunction to make waves in the scene. This is a language sans nouns; a lingua franca consisting only of verbs: motion, phase transition, aural morphology, all moving at the speed of left and right.
As the Universe of sound finds ears, vibrating shards meld into sonic calling cards: An ever-shifting musical identity that gives way to unrelenting multiplicity. Thanks to technology often perceived as obsolete, the entire history of sound is available for data-mining. The DJ is an archeologist of vinyl plates. Digging in the crates, (s)he returns with pieces to the amorphous puzzle. A cartographer of soundscapes unknown and yet unformed, the DJ makes the maps and the terrain simultaneously on the fly.
Sound manipulation is the foundation of all musical forms. The individual control of audible vibrations is what allows musicians to create aurally aesthetic sounds. As Paul D. Miller writes, “When Thomas Edison first recorded the human voice onto a tin foil roll singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’ on December 6, 1877, history changed. It became malleable in a form never before seen on this planet. Experiences of events, and the moment-events themselves could be captured, edited, sequenced, and distributed. What Edison did was take the voice and reduce it to its basic component: sound.”[1] This is what the DJ in Hip-hop does when he combines and reanimates bits and pieces of old recorded history to create entirely new compositions. The music represents a future without a past.[2]
Surf, Sample, and Manipulate
Where turntablism was the most exciting thing happening in music at the turn of the millennium, the art of the remix has moved online. The power of the record company has suffered another blow as the power of the DJ has been networked. Call it “uploadphonics,” “bootlegging,” or just plain “remixing,” but whatever you call it, it is a war of intellectual property, a war of copyrights, a war of the freedom of speech and most of all a war of sound. Online, underground remixers like 2 Many DJs, The Evolution Control Committee (whose slogan reads, “We’re so next year.”), Rick Silva a.k.a. CueChamp, Cassetteboy, Bit Meddler, and many others “surf, sample and manipulate” (in the words of Mark Amerika).[3]
Rick Silva calls uploadphonics “a tight spiral outwards of creativity that makes a music in tune with the ideals of the internet, a soudscape to fit the netscape.”[4] Record companies, in an effort to retain control, are fighting a moving target. Indeed, a moving target made up of moving targets: peer-to-peer networks are completely decentralized. The file trade is made from node to node, without central control. The center does not hold.
As I write this I am (re)mixing music. Through my KaZaa Lite P2P client, I’ve downloaded a cracked version of Sonic Foundry’s Acid 3.0 mixing software, as well as a plethora of songs in MP3 format. In the past few weeks, I have been able to literally re-work many of my favorite songs. Lifting a beat from one, a guitar lick from another and vocals from a cappella versions, I’ve made entirely new compositions that none of these artists ever intended, and then uploaded them for distribution to others. Anyone with a connection to the Internet wields the same power. Think of it as a massive, collective phase transition: the record companies put out solids (records), the Hip-hop DJ melts them down into liquids (remixes, etc.) and the home-computer remix kids boil the mass into gaseous vapor (molecules of sound, splitting and recombining without end). While there is still product coming down from on high, the “central truth” no longer holds ultimate power. There is no divine sonic word. There is only sound and infinite ways to put it together.
“In a recent post to boomselection.com an assignment was given out,” writes Rick Silva in an article from 2002 on online remixing, “a call to remix Eminem’s latest track was followed by a link to the MP3 of the a capella version. A week later boomselection released a subsite dedicated only to the Eminem remixes because the response had been so positive. The tracks were rated and posted. The number one track was number one mainly because of its amazing turnaround time. Within ten minutes of the assignment, someone had turned in a bootleg. The remixer took ten minutes to download the a capella, find a track roughly the same BPM, sync it, record it, encode it to MP3, FTP (upload) it, and mail out the link.”[5] All of this is good fun for fans and remixers, but a virtual nightmare for the recording industry.
Two weeks prior to the release of Eminem’s 2002 record, The Eminem Show, an advanced copy found its way onto a popular peer-to-peer network. As widespread downloading ensued, Eminem’s record company was forced to release his record a week before it had originally planned. “The source of this conundrum is as simple as its solution is complex,” writes John Perry Barlow on the digitizing of intellectual property. “Digital technology is detaching information from the physical plane, where property law of all sorts has always found definition.”[6] Since the replication of a file in digital format doesn’t decrease its quality, nor does it have limits, this is where the ideas of copyright, intellectual property, and digital bootlegging collide head-on.
No one has brought this collision to the attention of the mass mind like DJ Danger Mouse. His Grey Album, which meshed the a cappella vocals of Jay-Z’s Black Album with music lifted from The Beatles’ White Album, was an internet sensation that set off a shitstorm in boardrooms and bedrooms everywhere. Record company suits were scrambling to kill it, and bedroom remixers were scrambling to outdo it. The record (in its modern form: the physical compact disc) was squashed by a cease and desist order from EMI (who own the rights to The Beatles record), but its children replicated: The Brown Album, The Rainbow Album, The Slack Album, etc. (the latter of which is an amusing blend of Jay-Z’s vocals and music from Pavement’s Slanted and Enchanted record by DJ n-wee). The remixing continues — and so does the battle to stop it.
The United States Copyright Act states that “the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means… for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright.”[7] The art collage band Negativland tested this clause long before Eminem was asking the real version of his oft-remixed song “Without Me” to “please stand up.”
In 1991 Negativland released a single titled “U2” which sampled the Irish supergroup’s hit single “Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” The song and the release of the single were both part parody, part critique, and part media prank (some off-mike comments by Casey Kasem were also a part of the composition). It was quickly sued out of existence by U2’s label, Island Records.[8] Not to be beaten so soon, Negativland released a magazine in 1993 chronicling the court case. “The Letter U and the Numeral 2” was sued out of existence by Negativland’s own label, SST Records (also for alleged copyright infringement: Negativland used SST bumper stickers and press releases in the publication).[9]
“We live in a world where nothing is what we were taught it was,” Negativland write in the introduction to their 1995 book on the ordeal. “Art is business, business is war, war is advertising, and advertising is art. We are bombarded with information and entertainment. Negativland responds to this environment by making music that uses fragments and samples from existing media of all kinds.”[10] For Negativland, if it’s on the airwaves (or the internet), it’s fair game for fair use.
Bits and Pieces
While the legalities of remixing are still squirming under the weight of innovation, the format of music has shape-shifted as well — from atoms to bits.[11] The advent of the Compact Disc changed recording in many ways, but the fact that a band could now do over an hour of music (without having to release a double LP) was one of them. Where the CD killed the LP, shrunk cover art, and caused the public to buy all of their albums on a new digital format, the MP3 ends the tyranny of any multi-song format of the past. We’re now back to the single (without a B-side). A single made of bits, not atoms. A single awaiting a home on the mass storage device of your choice. A single awaiting a new beat, a new vocal track, or a new time signature.
“Just as a Powerbook is a processing-machine,” writes online remixer Tim Jaeger, “and Max/MSP is audio software with which users can program, code, and construct their own virtual instruments, combined they become meta-samplers and schiz-machines. Max/MSP consumes other instruments only to turn them into new, different instruments for others to use and produce new instruments with. The same with turntables, or small CASIO keyboards spitting out sampled rhythms from old New Order records.”[12] It’s music as shareware, open source sound, armed audio warfare… Embrace the postmodern: Reduce, reuse, recycle. The future of music is in our hands: Let’s remix it.
1. Cumulus from America; Cartridge Music: Of Palimpsets and Parataxis, or How to Make a Mix by Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid).
2. Band of the Hand by Roy Christopher, Born Magazine, 1997.
3. “Uploadfonix” by Rick Silva, 21C Magazine.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “The Economy of Ideas” by John Perry Barlow, 1993.
7. United States Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 107, 1988 ed. and Supp. IV).
8. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
9. Spin Magazine, May 1993.
10. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 by Negativland, Seeland MediaMedia, 1995.
11. Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, Vintage, 1995.
12. “Scatter(ed) Dynamics” by Tim Jaeger, posted on the macrosound discussion list, January 3, 2003.
[Media Reader, #8, 2005]
Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky
If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain — do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set? — Warren Ellis
We’re all connected. Our saturated selves are each a part of a collective, socially constructed mix of language games and habits without names. “All minds quote,” once quoth Ralph Waldo Emerson, but let’s forget about the mind, the brain, and the head that holds them. It’s not about nouns; it’s about verbs. It’s not about the dots, it’s about the connections between them. Networks, not nodes. The journey, not the destination. It’s a trigger, not a gun. Software is the paradigm of the now. It’s where nouns become verbs and all are subject to “the changing same.” Continue reading “Rhythm Science by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky”
I Get on the Mix Late in the Night
Well, last night I finally got out of my bedroom and subjected the public to my loud, noisy tastes in vinyl. Yep, my first live set in several years. I hauled a crate down to the Rosary Room (in downtown San Diego) and played a brief, but fun blend of noise.
The set list looked something like this:
- Unwound — first minute and a half of “We Invent You” (it’s just guitar feedback, if you haven’t heard it)
- Mogwai “Secret Pint”
- My Bloody Valentine “Soon”
- Camera Obscura “Cinemateque”
- Brian Eno “Deep Blue Monday”
- Hood “Branches Bare”
- Bare Minimum “Luchuk”
- Mogwai “Fear Satan (My Bloody Valentine Remix)”
I’ll probably try and do this every first and third Thursday of the month, so if you’re into the loud, rythmic drone of what you see above, come check it out.
February 20, 2004: “I get on the mix late in the night…” — Chuck D
Last night at the Rosary Room, my early morning (1am) setlist looked like this:
- DJ Spooky “You Are Now About to Witness…”
- Hair and Skin Trading Company “Conscious Uncons:..?*U12/Knife Fright”
- Hovercraft “De-Orbit Burn (Scanner Remix)”
- Mogwai “Sine Wave”
- Still “Anodyne”
- Techno Animal “Megaton (dälek Remix)”
- My Bloody Valentine “Soon”
- Main “Rail”
The B-Boys had all gone home by the time I was on, so it was probably best that I was on so late. I do bring the noise, but a little too literally for the body rock, knaw’mean?
Ryan Kidwell a.k.a. Cex: Brutal Exposure
“Playing it safe isn’t interesting,” once quoth Ryan Kidwell a.k.a. Cex. The 20-year old laptop beat-twister-cum-emcee just dropped his fifth major release in four years and has another one on the way. Though being young and white on the mic is not the most auspicious spot, Kidwell risks it with heft, hubris and humor, saying, “I’m like the white Eminem.” The kid is like crack: sit through Tall, Dark and Handcuffed (Tigerbeat6, 2002) just once and you’ll be hooked. How is he so young and able to speak with the wisdom of such ages? How does he expect us to take him seriously when he’s rockin’ gold fronts? Cex is the confusion, collusion, and conflict of all of this and more. Continue reading “Ryan Kidwell a.k.a. Cex: Brutal Exposure”
dälek: Gods and Griots
Music transcends all boundaries. And where music fans are generally open for anything engaging, the music industry is constantly segregated by its own marketing terms. They draw lines, set up demographics, and distinguish target markets.
Caught somewhere in between these lines, dälek have been victims of this segregation since their inception. Their first record Negro, Necro, Nekros (1998) was on independent rock label Gern Blandsten Records (the folks who brought you the brilliant, indie avant-garde act Rye Coalition), but they do hip-hop. This put the record in a crack in the marketplace. There’s nothing normal about what dälek do but it’s hip-hop to the core. Frontman dälek’s gruff vocals grind against the gritty backdrop of scraping noise created by Oktopus and Still, the friction lending light to their dark imagery. Continue reading “dälek: Gods and Griots”
dälek: From Filthy Tongue
It’s 5:30 am. I’m up before San Diego’s ever-shining sun (I have a 7 o’clock class to teach). I’m trying to negotiate the bodies strewn across my living room floor — in the dark. At least one has moved since lights out last night (a mere 3 hours ago).
These sleeping, dark figures scattered across my floor are Oktopus (noise, production, laptop navigation), Still (turntable destruction, attitude, Top Ramen), dälek (vocals, intimidation, spiritual leader) and Mike (merch, driving, beard). Collectively they’re known as dälek. These guys tour like the earth is on fire. They eat whatever they can scrounge from endless gigs. And right now they’re sleeping.
dälek (the group) is pure Hip-hop. Their first record Negro, Necro, Nekros was on independent rock label Gern Blandsten Records (the folks who brought you the brilliant, indie avant-garde act Rye Coalition). This put the record in an odd spot in the marketplace. There’s nothing normal about what these guys do, but it’s Hip-hop to the core. dälek’s gruff vocals grind against the gritty backdrop of scraping noise created by Oktopus and Still, the friction lending light to their dark imagery. Lyrics spit to illuminate the spirit:
Scraped knees don’t prove what you believe
Your blind faith passed to your seeds,
Killed our garden type weeds,
Turn around and blame it on Eve.
While you blame me for blemishing our family tree
I’ll uproot all of humanity.
“Negro, Necro… was recorded as kind of an experiment,” dälek explains in an earlier interview. “We had no live experience; we had no idea what we were doing… There is something amazing about that innocence. However… Looking back there is a lot about us that Negro failed to capture. Filthy Tongue… better represents our live sound, and has an air of confidence which can only come from four years of hardcore touring.”
The most innovative people in independent music are among their friends, supporters and collaborators. They’ve toured with DJ Spooky, Techno Animal (Justin Broadrick and Kevin Martin’s harsh Hip-hop outfit), Tomahawk (one of Mike Patton’s many projects, this time with guitarist Duane Denison), Isis and collaborated with the William Hooker Ensemble (the New York Jazz drummer and friends). Patton’s Ipecac label just put out their latest record, From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots.
“This album represents about four years of our work…” dälek continues. “Lyrically, I continued on a very personal level… Though abstract… Again I ask the listeners to find their own meaning in my personal madness. Musically this album is very aggressive… We expand on what we started on Negro… Perhaps a bit more focused this time around… with more of our own defined sound.”
Some of the beats on Filthy Tongue… recall Bomb Squad-era Public Enemy: booming, pummeling and raging with the screeching of the apocalypse in between. The comparisons end there though. The rest of dälek’s sound is all their own: A giant, scraping clamor that scares most Hip-hop fans. dälek tend to fair better touring with noisy, guitar-driven rock bands (and they’ve done split singles with both Kid606 and Techno Animal).
“First off, what is passed off as Hip-hop in the mainstream is a farce: That is POP music,” states a disgusted dälek. “It has its place but that’s a place that hasn’t been the breeding ground for acceptance of new forms and variations since perhaps the later Beatles stuff. The real problem lies in the underground, where there are really good groups, however, it seems the underground has just become an ‘on-deck circle’ where the less known musicians await their chance to fit molds of ‘real Hip-hop’ which are dictated by the corporate world. If your ultimate goal is to make money… Cool, I guess. But what is lost is the essence of what made Hip-hop the innovative force it was in the 80s and early 90s. Hip-hop was about taking all the sounds and ideas around you, and making them into your own. It was the angst-ridden voice of minority youth. Energy and angst-wise, it was the equivalent of the punk movement. I think we can safely say that the commercial music world killed both Hip-hop and punk. The formulaic remnants can’t afford to allow truly different music in because that would result in loss of sales.”
So, given the situation in the Hip-hop underground, given that these guys are sleeping on my floor (again) and given that in a few hours when Still wakes up, he’s going to make Top Ramen (again), what is it that drives dälek?
“I want to make music that moves me,” dälek concludes. “There are sounds and words I need to get out, that I myself need to hear. We are musicians… Music is what drives us.”
[SLAP Magazine, 2002]
X-ecutioners: Turning the Tables
Sunday afternoon in San Diego. I’d just woken up after a nap to try and kill a headache. I groggily checked the clock. “I have to meet Rob Swift in Solana Beach in fifteen minutes,” I thought to myself. I grabbed a Coke out of the ‘fridge, my hand-held recorder and hit the road.
On my way up I-5, chugging the Coke, I scrawled possible questions on my hand with a Sharpie. Less prepared for this interview, I could not be.
Luckily, when I arrived and Rob came down from his room to meet me, he’d just woken up as well. He got a cup of hot cocoa and we slumped on the couch, chatting sleepily.
The last time I saw Rob was five years ago. The X-Men (as they are known in un-copyrighted contexts) were playing at the Crocodile Café in Seattle. Rob, Total Eclipse, Roc Raida, Mista Sinista (who’s since left the group to pursue acting projects and solo career) and I gathered around a table in the Croc’s back bar to discuss the future of turntablism. Right then it looked as if DJs as artists were finally making headway in the competitive milieu of modern music. Om Records’ Deep Concentration tour (featuring Radar, Peanut Butter Wolf and Cut Chemist on this particular leg) had just played at the Showbox the night before. Despite the enthusiasm we all felt at the time, a breakthrough of the art of the turntable was not to be.
In the five years since our last meeting, the DJ has remained in the background. Rarely heard on even Hip-hop compositions, some of the most talented musicians of our time still toil in the background of the underground. The Invizble Skratch Piklz (The X-men’s West Coast counterparts) disbanded — each to pursue his own projects — leaving the X-Men as the leading DJ crew still together, putting out their own records.
“In a way, I feel like we are leading the way and setting the example,” Rob says between sips from his hot cocoa. “At this point we’re the most high-profile DJ group so we kinda set the pace. That’s not to say that we’re better than anybody, or that we’re the best, or that nobody can fuck with us, but on one level, we are the leaders. We’re the first group to make it to Billboard. We made it to shows like Carson Daly and MTV’s Icon. We’re definitely knocking a lot of doors down that haven’t even been touched by other DJ crews.” True dat: The X-ecutioners second full-length Built from Scratch (Sony, 2002) debuted at number fifteen on the Billboard charts. They’ve been in a Gap commercial, on David Letterman and, thanks to a collaboration with Mike Shinoda and Mr. Hahn from Linkin Park, they’ve gotten airplay all over the place.
“I’m glad that the record has gotten the exposure that it has because it’s good for the music in general,” Rob says. “People are like ‘Why’d you do a song with Linkin Park? They’re a rock band.’ But why not? Rock and Hip-hop have had a relationship since the beginning of Hip-hop. DJs used to cut Rock records in the 70s: Aerosmith, Rush, Billy Squire, AC/DC…” By collaborating with members of Linkin Park, the X-Men were able to slip under the mainstream’s radar, and as Rob adds, “Let people hear a whole other way of making music.”
Finding this “other way of making music” has been an ongoing quest for me. In 1995, feeling that art of the DJ was disappearing from Hip-hop, I went in search of the lost art of the scratch. After a few months of digging in the crates and combing the independent Hip-hop releases in various record stores, I found Bomb Records’ first DJ Compilation, The Return of the DJ, Vol. One. It was here that I found the Skratch Piklz, Beat Junkies, Z-Trip and Radar, Cut Chemist and the X-Men and was briefly sanguine about the survival of art form. Seven years later, it’s still and underground phenomenon and one still has to search for it, save the exposure that the X-Men have garnered.
The cover of Built from Scratch pays homage to Public Enemy’s 1986 debut, Yo! Bumrush the Show (Def Jam/Columbia), featuring not only the X-Men, but the pioneers of turntablism as well.
“We’re all Public Enemy fans in the group,” Rob says explaining the cover. “I was a huge Public Enemy fan, I have pictures of myself with Chuck D. I met him in like1986 or 87 at a show he did in the Bronx. So, our manager, Peter Kang, was like, ‘It would be really cool if the cover of the album was a tribute to Yo! Bumrush the Show where it’s the same basement setting and you guys are plotting to take over Hip-hop. You guys would be like the S1Ws and Flavor Flav would be Grand Wizard Theodore…’ and so on and so forth. We have Grand Wizard Theodore, Kool Herc, Grand Mixer DST: three legends of DJing, and three different generations of DJing, and then you have us. When you look at the cover, it shows the lineage of DJing, where it’s been and where it is now.” This image puts the perfect face on a sound that is indeed bumrushing the industry, not unlike the way Public Enemy did in the late eighties. The compositions that the X-Men build with scratches are comparable to nothing else in music. Ever. The only analogy lies in the improvisation of Jazz musicians. Even then, the X-Men aren’t limited by any one instrument — they can play and manipulate any recorded sound.
Later that night at The Scene in the Clairemont-Mesa area of San Diego, the tag team crew of Total Eclipse, Roc Raida and Rob Swift manipulated many sounds live on stage. This is where the art of DJing truly manifests itself. With a row of Technics 1200s linked by various mixers and cables, the X-Men wreck shop. Blending beats, samples and their unique styles into an aural onslaught – intricately timed and improvised on the spot — these guys don’t seem to notice the limits they break on a daily basis.
“The most important thing with the next album is to figure out a way to re-invent ourselves again,” Rob stated earlier, thinking ahead. “To not come out sounding the same is the most challenging thing that we’re going to face.”
[The X-Men check sound at the Crocodile circa 1997.]
[SLAP Magazine, 2002]
[photos by Roy Christopher]
One Song
Though I haven’t been keeping up with the actual lyrics, I do have a passing awareness that there’s currently lyrical beef between Nas and Jigga. This is only relevant to the following in that as much as I respect Jay-Z, he and everyone else has now fallen behind. Continue reading “One Song”
MC Paul Barman: Architect of Dialect, Fulfiller of Dreams, Over-Educated MC Über Alles
“I love that we’re talking about this right next to the water,” says a prophetic Paul Barman. We’re sitting on the beach in San Diego just outside Cane’s Bar and Grill where MC Paul Barman is playing his first San Diego gig — with Mix Master Mike no less. Our casual, pre-show chat has turned to water, and he’s turned very serious. Continue reading “MC Paul Barman: Architect of Dialect, Fulfiller of Dreams, Over-Educated MC Über Alles”