Sunday, October 26, 2003
About a month ago I heard about a website called Illegal Art and when I checked it out found it was for an exhibition of various paintings, exhibits and whatnot that had been withdrawn due to copyright restrictions. The exhibition was in America so a bit beyond my means to pop out and see, but there was a magazine also involved, 'Stay Free', so I bought a copy of that which came with a free CD of illegal music. And it finally turned up yesterday.
It consists of 21 tracks of various levels of production quality by a range of artists. Some are 'proper tracks', such as Negativland's U2, a mix of a cover of 'I still haven't found what I'm looking for' on what sounds like a hammond organ, with cuts of late night radio shows and Casey Casem swearing over the top. There's also Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, with tracks that never saw the light of day due to problems clearing the samples. And there's John 'Plunderphonics' Oswald and The JAMMs who contribute Dancing Queen, the ABBA song with The KLF spinning a tail of travelling down to London to take over as Queen from Liz II (At this point you might be interested in looking at the archives at Detritus, say no more).
Then there are the weirder things, such as Culturcide's They Aren't The World, in which they sing over the top of the charidee hit We Are The World, brilliantly skewering their pretense of caring and Xper.Xr's Wu-chu-tung which consists of playing EMF's Unbelievable and then vocalising the bass guitar over the top, until someone comes in the room and disturbs him.
The final type of tracks are those which, as in The Evolution Control Committee's Rocked by Rape are tracks built around stuff taken from TVs and radios and cut into new tracks, RbR samples Dan Rather newscasts, Dummy Run's f.d. is assembled from a radio segment on how sampling leaves poor old musicians without a penny while the sampler goes on to fame and fortune.
It's a real mix of a CD, of course (no pun intended). How they managed to get this out without being jumped on by the record industry I don't know. It's very limited but worth a listen if you can get hold of it.
Ethically? Well, as the music industry have a long and ignoble history of ripping off their artists, I don't think they're in much of a strong moral position to complain when other people do the same thing to their catalogues and it tends to end up benefiting everyone involved. But then capitalism has nothing to do with sensible adult decisions and long-term decisions.
It consists of 21 tracks of various levels of production quality by a range of artists. Some are 'proper tracks', such as Negativland's U2, a mix of a cover of 'I still haven't found what I'm looking for' on what sounds like a hammond organ, with cuts of late night radio shows and Casey Casem swearing over the top. There's also Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, with tracks that never saw the light of day due to problems clearing the samples. And there's John 'Plunderphonics' Oswald and The JAMMs who contribute Dancing Queen, the ABBA song with The KLF spinning a tail of travelling down to London to take over as Queen from Liz II (At this point you might be interested in looking at the archives at Detritus, say no more).
Then there are the weirder things, such as Culturcide's They Aren't The World, in which they sing over the top of the charidee hit We Are The World, brilliantly skewering their pretense of caring and Xper.Xr's Wu-chu-tung which consists of playing EMF's Unbelievable and then vocalising the bass guitar over the top, until someone comes in the room and disturbs him.
The final type of tracks are those which, as in The Evolution Control Committee's Rocked by Rape are tracks built around stuff taken from TVs and radios and cut into new tracks, RbR samples Dan Rather newscasts, Dummy Run's f.d. is assembled from a radio segment on how sampling leaves poor old musicians without a penny while the sampler goes on to fame and fortune.
It's a real mix of a CD, of course (no pun intended). How they managed to get this out without being jumped on by the record industry I don't know. It's very limited but worth a listen if you can get hold of it.
Ethically? Well, as the music industry have a long and ignoble history of ripping off their artists, I don't think they're in much of a strong moral position to complain when other people do the same thing to their catalogues and it tends to end up benefiting everyone involved. But then capitalism has nothing to do with sensible adult decisions and long-term decisions.
