In B-Flat Two-Point-Oh

Check out in Bb 2.0. It's the result of a collaborative video/music (okay, multimedia) mixing project. It goes at least one step further than Kutiman's "Thru You" by putting the controls at your fingertips.

Spotted via Create Digital Music.

The Farewell Instigator EP

Finally. My farewell release as Instigator: Reduced Materials.

This EP is FREE. (Heh,"reduced", get it?) Please make a donation to show your support. Or not. Hear more layers with repeated listening. Or not. Here's the official blurb, from the official page:

Instigator - Reduced Materials EP
2008, PYLBUG / Noise Throng [Chicago, IL]

Selections from Instigator's 2002 debut, Used Materials, are revisited on the fifth anniversary of the album's digital release in 2003. Careful reductions in program length unearth and enhance the song structures, and a strategic price reduction (it's FREE) make Reduced Materials the perfect companion to Used Materials, as well as a fitting farewell to the Instigator moniker. Tracklist:

01 Reforestation (Berry Jungle)
02 Recognition (Depress And Enter)
03 Requisition (High-Style Takeover)
04 Reevaluation (Hydrocodonarcotica)
05 Reinfestation (Miracle Earworm)
06 Recollection (Okanna Borra)
07 Resignation (Panhandler)
08 Reiteration (Poh Sukumer Vidro)
09 Remodellacion (Puerto Reconditioned)

Download Full EP [.zip]
Only available online: Reduced Materials EP (High-Quality 320 kbps MP3s plus album art in a .zip archive).

Make A Donation
This EP is free, and donation is recommended as the best way to show your support. If you like it, pay a little something for it; 100% of your support goes directly to the artist. It doesn't get much easier than this convenient PayPal button:

MT9 An Empty Promise?

Buzz Feed spots a new audio format out of Korea called MT9. The buzz seems to imply that this format will overtake MP3 as the format of choice, but I think that's awfully premature and more than a little naive.

A new audio file format that may come to replace MP3s — six channels of sound that the user can control. What’s the big deal? MT9 files allow you to remix them — turn up the bass, make it a capella, create a music-only version for karaoke, etc. They’re getting a big push in Korea, whatever that means.

What that means: This is most likely a novelty format which will probably be aimed at mobile devices. That's my guess, anyway. In Korea, where they are light years ahead of the US in terms of mobile devices. Otherwise, there are too many issues with this format to be practical for proper music production.

First, you have only six channels. That might sound like a lot to the average consumer, but to anyone who's produced music it's extremely restrictive. The last forty years of popular music has been made with at least eight channels, with current releases going beyond 128 channels, limited only by processor speed and hard drive capacity. Some pop songs have more than six tracks of vocals alone!

The advantage over MP3 is that MT9 is modular to an extent, but it appears to be a novelty music technology for non-musicians. Like Guitar Hero; I'm sure it's fun and engaging, but it doesn't make you a guitarist. The modular aspect is not a unique advantage, save for the fact that the whole song seems bundled into one file - but that tells me that it's not going to be a file of any high fidelity.

I am immediately reminded of the loop packs that have been available for more than a decade - the most recent being things like Apple's Jam Packs for Garage Band or Randy Jackson's Producer's Packs for Acid. Sure, it is customizable sound, but it's not going to make you a producer just for turning one of six tracks on or off. This is actually content that's already been produced, then parceled into incomplete chunks that consumers can pay to re-assemble.

Realistically, as this article implies, MT9 is probably little more than a customizable karaoke format. It's certainly no MP3 replacement, though the press seems to want to make it one. Karaoke is a big business in Korea and much of Asia, so maybe this will be a hit there.

After over twelve years of producing and mixing music, I wouldn't abandon MP3 for MT9; I do work with MP3, but prefer uncompressed formats like WAV and AIFF. If this new format doesn't work with existing software and player applications, it's going to have a hard time being adopted. We'll see if MT9 ever makes it to US shores.

Hello Muxtape, Goodbye Muxtape?

For the past couple weeks, all kinds of folks have been hyping the Muxtape. I say live it up now, because it isn't likely to last. Why? The basic-yet-totally-vague requirement that your MP3 uploads must meet for Muxtape: "Users may not upload multiple songs from the same album or artist, or songs they do not have permission to let Muxtape use."

So, the first thing I think is, how do I know if I have permission to let Muxtape use a song? Apparently there's no way to know for sure. Muxtape doesn't explain itself, which could spell trouble with a capital R-I-A-A.

What was Muxtape thinking, exactly? The blog implies that it's a way for bands to post their original songs, but if you're a band you need to do more than just post your songs (you use sites like MySpace to collect fans' info, too). The majority of Muxtapes posted are begging for legal action. In fact, a cursory look at just a few random posts reveals rampant unauthorized duplication. (The only "safe" mix I can find is this genius offering from Catbirdseat.)

I'm going to get this out of the way now: Nice sorta knowin' ya, Muxtape. Find a good lawyer and make room for all the C & D's you're about to get.*

* Unless you're some elaborate means of entrapment, rigged by the RIAA, in which case I salute your sinister scheme and simultaneously shiver at the settlements you'll wring from the stupid saps who keep uploading illegally.

Anti-Social Bookmarking (what del.icio.us is now)

If you've read PYLB for a while, you've probably noticed that I've been experimenting with del.icio.us (which, like Flickr, is owned by Yahoo!) to display my links on the sidebar of this page. It seemed like the one social bookmarking tool that served my purposes. But in the past week, it's been on the fritz. As I type, the linkroll script supplied by del.icio.us is displaying my tagroll. That's a significant error, and it's making me think del.icio.us was a bad choice. (Then again, we have no reason to expect stability from anything Yahoo! does these days.)

So, are any of you using social bookmarking services? Which ones? How do you like them? I'd love to know, because it's a pain to keep converting all of one's bookmarks from one service to another. I just want one that works, simply, and easily plugs into my site and my blog. If I need to ditch del.icio.us and head elsewhere, where should I turn?

Drop Where You Shop

Saw on Consumerist today that shopdropping is experiencing a spike in popularity. Fun!

SHOPDROP: To covertly place merchandise on display in a store. A form of "culture jamming" s. reverse shoplift, droplift.

Brings to mind The Droplift Project, who've been droplifting for years. Doesn't quite top Bansky's museum-hack, but it's the same idea. The Center for Tactical Magic demonstrates a lot of the ideas I first heard articulated in Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone. Not that I've read all that, I recommend you absorb it the same way I did - listen to it*.

[* If anyone knows of an acapella version of this recording, please share. (I think the mid-90's "world/ambient" music bed might prevent some listeners from getting the most of Bey's reading, plus I'd like to mash-up some bits of it myself.)]

For those who want to skip the strategy and go straight to the rush of shopdropping, there's PeopleProducts123, an endeavor of the Anti-Advertising Agency.

Pixel Piracy, But At What Price?

Based on this trailer, I'm intrigued by Pixel Pirate, but I'm not sure I'm convinced to purchase a DVD of this going on for a whole hour. Granted, I'm probably the only person I know who would even consider purchasing it. The randomness of samples is what I fear might be more annoying than anything, because I don't get a strong sense of coherent plot from the trailers. I don't see a strategy behind samples, from whence they were taken, or how they are recontextualized. Frankly, the sources listed are the typical sources that have been sampled by many artists and editors alike for years. On the flip-side of that, only 300 sources in a full hour? I've fit over 100 sources into 11 minutes, and still eeked out some narrative value.

Maybe I'd have a different opinion if I watched the whole thing. Maybe experiencing it first-hand would win me over. Maybe I'm simply not going to pay for it because I believe works like this (some of which I've created and still distribute free-of-charge to others) should carry no commercial value.

I'm not suggesting that this remixing in any way corrupts our culture - the "price" referred to in the title is literally about the fact that this isn't being distributed free-of-charge. But I'm jaded. You be the judge... Is it worth AUD$26?

From Pixel Pirate II "about" page, which does hint at the alleged plot:

Pixel Pirate II: Attack of the Astro Elvis Video Clone is an hour long narrative remix video constructed from samples pirated from over 300 film and music sources. It contains no original audio or video footage. Think of it as a sci-fi / biblical epic / action movie with a subplot of troubled romance. It also stars Elvis Presley, Moses, The Hulk, Monkey, Batman & Robin, Michael Jackson and The Ghostbusters.

The Year is 3001 and the ancient art of remix is being oppressed by the evil tyrant Moses and his Copyright Commandments. Meanwhile, in a secret base-camp on the moon a team of Pixel Pirates plot to overthrow Moses via their latest scientific discovery - video cloning. Their plan: travel back to 1955, abduct Elvis and bring him back to the future. They then clone Elvis and send the Video Clone back to 2015 to assassinate Moses, altering the course of VHS history. But first the Elvis Clone must face-off against the Copyright Cops and every action hero that MGM can throw his way.

Piracy is a business model

Interesting post on Boing Boing, quoting a Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney. While the executive's comments at Mipcom seem clearly spurned by the belief that "content is king", Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow rounds out his post with a moment of clarity to which more studio execs and marketers should subscribe:

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Well put. I'm inspired to put it this way:
Conversation is king because no one can own it.

(Not even Disney, not even with all the pirate references ... coincidentally made as a Disney pirate movie special edition DVD is made available for pre-order.)

In fact, Sweeney goes on to mention that some consumers want to consume content in a timely fashion so as to not miss out on the proverbial "watercooler moment" - conversation, in not so many words. This doesn't jive with her "content is king" stance. You don't bring content to the watercooler, you bring conversation. Let me give you an example:

This week, had I a watercooler conversation, it would have been about how the streaming online player for selected ABC programs doesn't work very well, and how the Disney-owned network was unable to stream more than twenty seconds of LOST without grinding to a halt for minutes at a time (an unpleasant, frustrating user experience). I'd then turn the conversation to the feeling I got, saying "just go buy it at iTunes and be done with this", and how I thought I'd just been teased into buying content I was supposed to have gotten for free. I'd managed to see a choppy two minutes of the episode, and now I wanted to see the rest. This is where I'd let the conversation go parenthetical...

(What do you do when the brand new, free streaming player isn't working? You can pay two dollars for the same content - plus DRM - at iTunes, or you could just watch for the content on a free P2P network, where you can get the content that will keep you in tomorrow's conversations.)

I would have concluded the conversation with mention of the BitTorrent options for freely acquiring the content on which our conversations thrive.

Get your refix on.

Beastie Boys have made even more acapellas available, complete with BPMs. It's an audio equivalent of what they did with Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That!

AND...

Ableton Live presents this Jack Dangers interview and Meat Beat Manifesto remix contest kit.

[It will be a miracle if I ever leave home this weekend.]

The refix is in (for now).

Refix? Yeah. Here's a fun example of a refix that follows-through on ETUC and movie remixing:

DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century - an audio-history of the cut-up. It's a bit of a listen, but I highly recommend checking both versions - the original mix is brilliant, and the refix is true genius.

Methods of refixing in sound recording date back to Musique concrète and through early forms of sampling and dub:

Tzara, Burroughs and Gysin called it the cut-up;
Zappa called his version xenocrany;
John Oswald dubbed it Plunderphonics;
Double Dee and Steinski considered their examples "lessons";
Pop Will Eat Itself said it all in their name.

Though not the first to use it, DJ Food is onto something with the term refix. For the time being, it is a remix of the term remix - and therefore may be a better word for this discussion. Technically, I'm refixing my blog by linking to previous posts to create a richer context for this particular post and to reinforce the themes behind this entire blog.

The refix not a new tactic. It's just a new word for an old trick. We have always reappropriated cultural capital, legally or otherwise, to re-tell stories (personal experiences) within individual and institutional worldviews.

Think of all the "classic" art that is little more than a commissioned depiction of a royal family imposed on biblical or mythological scenes - notably, without the permission or consent of those who wrote the Bible. Those Bible stories are largely based on previous mythology and folklore, but "fixed" enough to support Christianity's insidious patriarchy and supplant Pagan belief systems. These refixes are traditionally maintained as classic art because they've been hanging on museum walls for centuries - but apply the same tactic to modern media and you are asking for a cease and desist order, lawsuit or worse. (That's because our permission culture is all f'd up, and our courts can't clearly define fair use.)

The refix tactic reaches into all niches of culture, not just the traditional, classic arts: ricers, bikers and gearheads refer to it as Kustom Kulture; writers know it by several names, portmanteau perhaps the most exotic of them; gamers know it in the form of cheats, mods and even machinema; programmers and hackers may consider it open source; one day soon we will refix our own genetic codes under the ideals of democratic transhumanism.

It will no doubt be outdated in a matter of months, but for now the refix is in.

Boot Sale Sounds

Boot Sale Sounds is

A music blog , mainly featuring records and tapes found at boot sales, charity shops and flea markets. Mainly comedy, novelty and odd items that are hard to catagorise.

... and it's going to keep me busy this weekend, going through all the wonderfully strange content. Another awesome find via We Make Money Not Art.