Category Archives: Music

Make a new thing from that old thing

Music, Pals, Video, , , ,

Here’s the big argument why copyright should be off by default: the world makes more interesting things when sharing is on by default.

First up is Kutiman, who took the little demos that folks upload to youtube and turned it into a whole album, called Thru You.

PLEASE go check out the rest of that album.

The opposite side of that is fans love doing remixes and covers of the musicians they love. Then they share those covers. That is how culture is supposed to work. Sometimes the artists freak out and try to stop that sharing. Some artists say thank you. Some artists do even better and actually make a transformative work out what their fans did. I don’t know of anyone who has done this better than Gotye with Somebodies:

For more, watch Everything is a Remix.Here’s episode one.

Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

 

— Whoops! I’ve been trying to do a music video Monday thing – looks like I scheduled this post for the wrong day.

Why aren’t all music videos this good?

Art, Music, Software, Video, , , ,

New media is different than old media. Books are great, and I love them – but hypertext is way way better. I love music videos – they are great, but why aren’t more of them using the amazing new tools available to us.

I want more music videos like this:

Johnny Cash – Ain’t No Grave.
This is the king I think. The song is worth it. The artist Johnny Cash – nuff said. This is a crowd-sourced participatory art music video that you can swim through in multiple dimensions.
They took a music video and gave everyone who loves Johnny Cash a way to pay tribute. Go on there and you can draw a frame from the music video. You can rate the frames of others. And then you can push your way through the dimensional space of all this and watch the video with highest rated frames or most abstract frames or any of the other dimensions they’ve carved up. It’s a beauty and executed perfectly. I hope everyone clicks through to this.

Arcade Fire – The Wilderness Downtown
This was the first new media music video I heard about. Couldn’t get a browser to run it for the longest time. It pushed the limits so far and does so many things.

Watch the video. Birds fly through all the different frames. You run along the streets where you grow up, you write a letter to yourself and watch it grow like trees. A dream.

Yung Jake – http://e.m-bed.de/d
I’m not as much of a fan of this one because the music isn’t as good, the rhymes are sloppy. This perfectly marries the content to the form though. It’s about being shared, being embedded, the new narrative of music distribution. And it shows as it tells.

RO.ME – 3 Dreams of Black
Can’t watch it – don’t have WebGL. Supposed to be good.

Ellie Goulding – Lights
Ditto.

Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost
This is the counterpoint. See, this doesn’t feel like a new video. This feels like it’s just a new trick on an old concept. 3D is so hyped and so pointless most of the time. I mean seriously, BOOKS tell stories. We don’t need 3D unless it adds something.

Alt-J

Music, Video,

I have to share this new band I’m into. First watch the best new video I’ve seen in dog years.

I KNOW. Shows you that Memento could have been a hell of a lot shorter.

But that’s not my favorite song. Here’s the one that Chris and Sheep Robby have both picked up on:

Here’s a quieter one, but still great.

So this is just a post to let you know that I am now subscribed to the alt-j channel on youtube and http://soundcloud.com/alt-j/. And I’ll be seeing them live next time they are in town. I have it on excellent authority that they know how to play instruments in front of a crowd. Go ye forth and listen and share!

Seven Mercy Seats

Music, Video,

[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library

The Mercy Seat is a changeable beast. The song is very simple. A man is waiting to die in the electric chair, he is not afraid, he says he is innocent. He is executed and goes to his reward. The song is complex. The man may or may not be innocent, he is unreliable and crazy, he is not unafraid. He calls on the mercy seat that God sits on and is not heard.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play this song at every concert, changing the performance and the lyrics. Sometimes it curls up sweet and sad and slow.

Sometimes it roars like a lion and shakes the earth.

I like it loud like that. I feel the madness and bombast – it blows me away every time. One day I went on a mercy seat binge, listened to tons of versions and covers on youtube.

Johnny Cash made it his own. When Johnny Cash sang your song, it became his song.

The covers flowed and changed like the versions the Bad Seeds played live. Some were intimate and pushed against the base of your gut.

This Dresden Dolls cover is like a hammer banging onto a hammer banging onto a skull. Those DRUMS are so huge!

Shouldn’t ALL drum solos just be part of the song?

I found out there is a gospel song of the same name by an artist named Vicki Yohe. I love this version of it – the passion, the build, the weird guy clapping in the background! It really starts kicking at 3:10…

It has that same structure – the slow build and the giant pounding crescendo. They both deal with the Mercy Seat and I’d love to hear a mashup that builds them off of each other, trading despair and hope. Hell, let’s see what happens when we play them right over each other. IF I knew anyone who made mashups I’d totally log time helping or pay them to create this. Then I would listen to it until my ears fell off.

YouTube Doubler

Or maybe not. Not every bright idea works.

Movie Review: Copyright Criminals

Movie, Music, Pals, Reviews, , , , , ,

Copyright Criminals Boxed Set CoverSaw Copyright Criminals on Netflix Monday night while cooking up a mushroom risotto. Isn’t that the best time to watch a documentary, while you are waiting for something to boil or stirring occaisionally? Anyway, it’s a great great hip hop history, looking at the ways that copyright and remix culture intersect. You get interviews with all sorts of great turntabilists and producers like Public Enemy, De La Soul, and EL-P, but then you also get the side of guys who made the beats in the beginning like George Clinton and Clyde “Funky Drummer” Stubbelfield.

It turns out that if you cover a song, you are in the clear. Just don’t change any lyrics, you’re legally ok. However, if you lift a guitar riff, distort it and change the tempo or stutter it, then you’re a copyright criminal and you can’t make any cash off your music. There is a really good bit where the head of Tommy Boy and De La Soul are interviewed, discussing how the legal implications of sampling definitely changed the music they were making. Samples became more distorted to hide their origins, some songs are abandoned just because you can’t hope to clear the rights to a popular track. It’s strange to think of all the ghost songs floating out there that were smothered in their cradles before they could be heard or developed.

One last bit of the movie I really loved were the visual breakdowns of remix and mashup songs. Nothing makes it clearer how much actual artistry is happening than seeing the interleaving, distortions and tweaks in all the clips visually.