[microsound] projects

["Trace E. Reddell" <treddell@xxxxxx>]

All of this strikes me as less than inspiring. What's the point of working from stolen samples if you process them beyond recognition and any form of legal identification? Where's the risk in that? Where's the challenge or the protest or the resistance? And what's the point of such an aesthetic? Such an approach merely renders ALL sources equally meaningless because you process them the same way. In such a case, even if you write out your trail of samples and sources, you may as well be working from a copyrighted recording of the Beatles playing "Hey, Bulldog" as from your own field recording of dog farts.

Plunderphonics, mash-ups, and the new Negativland projects (check out "The Mashin' of the Christ" and "No Business" both at http://www.negativland.com) deal with the risk and pleasure of stealing and screwing up other people's stuff ... but the joke is that some of the pieces, and maybe all of them, are ultimately recognizable.  Otherwise, the irony is completely diffused, and the work is deprived of any cultural relevance.

You don't have to be very clever to find open source or "virtually public" samples. They're all over the place. I'm finding it depressing that so many can only conceive of microsound practice as a way to reprocess existing sound files. Yawn. Looking back over the history of microsound projects, most were created in just such a fashion: Parasites reworked Kim's files; McDonna reworked, illegally, Madonna/ACID Planet Loops; Bufferfuct reworked Kim's error files; City of the Future reworked a sample from Tarkovsky. Many of these projects -- and yeah, I've participated in them, too -- sound a lot of like. It seems clear to me that we've hit a creative dead-end -- and yeah, I mean myself, too.

I think it's a big mistake to think that the source is pointless and the process is everything. I'm so sick of max/msp patches and reaktor ensembles that can take anything from Bach to the Beastie Boys and make them sound like the same rumbling static and hi-freq screeches. What's the point? The point is, that microsound has mistakenly overvalued the language of the tool (that is, Kim's "the tool is the message") and process-based art. It has rendered content virtually pointless, and so has become just as bad as the hour-long group whack-offs favored by hippie jam bands.

But I'm really ranting specifically here about sample-based work, which I'm coming to despise in microsound. Is that all we can do? Can anyone on the list make a decent microsound track created from NO PRIOR RECORDED MATERIAL, their own or otherwise? I'm not talking about chopping up your field records and looping them through AudioMulch, or remixing your trash-folder of 2-sec recordings of your crashing hard-drive. Who's doing sample-less work? Or, on the other hand, who is doing risk-taking sample-based work that takes full advantage of the identity of its sources as a way to generate new meanings and recycle culture through the historical onflow of their manipulations?

-=the pHarmanaut


---- other's wrote ----

i'm all about it.  there are lots of open source or virtually public 
sound sources out there if you're clever.  also, i duly approve the use 
of small enough snippets or overly processed bits that could near 
impossibly be identified.
-ryan dunn
http://www.liscentric.com

On Sep 12, 2004, at 2:36 PM, visa wrote:

> Hi,
> there hasn't been any microsound projects in a while, has there? I was
> thinking that it might be fun to do something related to the recent 
> decision
> by the us federal appeals court which ruled all uncleared sampling 
> illegal:
> http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=43259
>
> It would imo be interesting to do a project more or less subtly 
> opposing
> this ruling. Like for instance, doing tracks entirely from uncleared
> samples, but processed unrecognizable...
>
> Is anyone interested in a project like this?
>
> ~Visa



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