Noise Throng Double-Feature?

I spent the entirety of President's Day (yesterday) updating long-time (entering tenth year) pet-project Noise Throng. That's not really the point of this post, but there are new archival recordings available there for interested parties.

Today two DVDs, both ordered while psyching myself up for said updates, arrived. I just realized that they essentially define the envelop of the Noise Throng catalog - from sampling/unapologetic copyright infringement to sheer, psychedelic, endurance-test noise. I also realized they'd make a terrific double-feature: People Who Do Noise followed by Copyright Criminals. Here are their respective trailers.

People Who Do Noise


Copyright Criminals


Enjoy.

Foul Play Giant

I've always had a bad taste in my mouth from the folks who gush over the work of Shepard Fairey. And now I'm snickering to myself that his legal counsel is abandoning him after it was revealed that he lied about which source he stole from / traced over for the Obama Hope poster.

Fairey represents a lot of what I don't like about the art world - arrogant double-standards. His work is entirely derivative if not outright stolen, which in itself is not offensive to me. There's nothing wrong with appropriation when proper attribution is given. Yet he continually passes himself off as original, and profits from creativity that simply wasn't his - without giving proper credit where it is clearly due. In fact, he outright lies about his sources. And Fairey is clearly lying for the sake of his own celebrity and profit, not for the sake of art.

I've always insisted that the work that put him on the map, Andre the Giant has a Posse and the resulting Obey work, were obviously inspired by John Carpenter's They Live - which starred a pro wrestler and featured subliminal outdoor advertising messages that read "obey" (among other Big Brotherly imperatives). Too many coincidences.

Given that it's now common practice to sue musicians for sampling even small portions of someone else's work without permission and/or payment, Fairey deserves to be held responsible for his actions. It's clear that his primary concern is being a celebrity; perhaps his ego prevents him from being honest about his work, his process and his tremendous debt to pop and fringe culture that preceded him and all of his sordid merchandising.

Fairey is complicit in the ugly corporatization of celebrity - at the expense of honesty, integrity and authenticity. It pains me that only the Obama poster is drawing this fact into the public discourse.

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.

Panic Or Something!

This one's a compare and contrast, my dear readers.

The article and essay below feel, to me, like they're making a lot of the same considerations. [Am I being too hasty, or is the impending "panic" essentially just a bad reaction to the realization that we've behaved like morons for far too long? Or is it a mixture of both?]

T.R.O.Y. claims, "I think a key ingredient is a sense of practical hope, a real feeling based in experience that what one is doing matters." I suspect Sterling might agree, since his writing seems to come from a similar sense of hope based on experience and "what matters". Read the pieces below and decide for yourself.

Bruce Sterling - "2009 Will Be A Year Of Panic"
[article]

-- vs --

T.R.O.Y. - "The Challenge Of Utopia"
[interview w/ link to .rtf]

Thoughts? (Post a comment.)

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.

Pseudonymity Reconsidered

I've been reconsidering some of my pseudonyms lately. And wondering how far pseudonymity will take you when you would prefer that your efforts were all related, connected and coherent.

The primary moniker I use for producing music, Instigator, has proven too ubiquitous. I adopted it eight years ago and am the oldest listing for artists named "Instigator", for the record. The bigger point is that I think I've outgrown it. I argue with myself about whether Instigator was supposed to do anything but get my solo production efforts underway. Things have been instigated well enough (the ambitious "Used Materials" album, and the fruitful Noise Throng label). It's time for the name, like the creative product itself, to move beyond the beginning-stage mentality.

This is what I did with INSTILLE, a name derived from the portmanteau of Instigator and Distille.

But getting my musical monikers in order inevitably leaves me reconsidering my PYLBUG moniker, too. A misspelling of pillbug, inspired by a dream about an abundance of insects and pills as interchangeable objects, it's been my handle for extra-curricular productions since 1995. Sometimes, however, I find myself wary of the connotations "pylbug" brings.

I am not, for the record, a pill-head any more than I am an insect aficionado. [Though I'm definitely much closer to the latter.] The reasoning by which I arrived at "pylbug" doesn't always hold up now, nearly 13 years later. Many of my extra-curricular efforts now seem inspired by different things, and this makes me feel like they should go by a different name. I'm considering a revised strategy to naming my projects; a refined point-of-view. Something like that.

All of that is for me to figure out. But, here's the question for my readers: where does your pseudonym come from, and did you plan any longevity into it? Maybe this question is more for bands, bloggers, content producers in general... people with a product that needs a brand name, if you will. What thought, if any, did you put into the act of picking your favorite pseudonym?

That is, if you can reveal the secrets behind your screen names.

Lillian Virginia Mountweazel

Kottke points us to a New Yorker article about fakes in your favorite encyclopedias, purposefully inserted in an effort to protect copyright.

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

Current TV, frozen in time

Al Gore once allegedly claimed that he invented the Internet. Whether he did or not, you'd assume that he was trying to position himself as a forward-thinker. So here's the unfortunate irony: his participatory-media venture is limited to the (relatively) primitive medium of cable television.

Douglas Rushkoff, who was in the initial brainstorming sessions for Current TV, remarks on his disappointment in what the project became, and opportunities it's missing.

The Recombinant

Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Though not all of us know it - yet.

William Gibson romanticizes our recombinant tendencies and cut-and-paste culture in this Wired article.

I've always liked the word recombinant - ever since first learning it during a genetics chapter in grade school science class (a truly remarkable occurrence for Catholic school). I wouldn't apply the term to my creative output for at least another ten years, once I learned to study culture in terms the meme (parallel to the gene in biology). Now it's a challenge to describe my work (and recreation) without using the "r" term, or some synonym of it.