Quote of the Week: The Law of Fluxus

Kyle Gann locates some cognitive dissonance between the communal art production of Fluxus, and the rigors of copyright law:

    The situation is absurd, somebody under whatever questionable chemical influences scrawls seven words on a piece of paper and 50 years later I can’t refer to that piece of paper without paying someone some money and following their prescriptions.

The gist of the situation is that Gann’s book on John Cage is being held up. Why? He explains, “[Y]ou are no longer allowed to quote texts that are entire pieces of art. This means I’ve been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young‘s ‘This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean,’ and Yoko Ono‘s ‘Listen to the sound of the earth turning.’ And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn’t responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I’ve excised the pieces from the text.”

Full entry at artsjournal.com/postclassic.

Past Week at Twitter.com/Disquiet

  • Gym music: all that equipment noise, cycled through @rjdj — and then the new Vladislav Delay. #
  • Probably last human on Earth to see 2nd Transformers movie. Sound design is insane: dense as Moulin Rouge!, but all industrial noise. #
  • Bruce Sterling — @bruces — has anointed an object with a story for @significobs http://is.gd/1WAyY #
  • Enjoying new Vladislav Delay album Tummaa. Pretty much first non-generative music I've listened to this week. Been deep in @rjdj on my iPod. #
  • If you Twitter it's #followfriday: sound artist @christofmigone & interactive app @rjdj — latter getting cool upgrade: http://bit.ly/2544IE #
  • Luggage Store Gallery tonight: Laptops, drums, more. #
  • Evening sounds: computer buzzing, distant typing, fridge hum, laundry next door (way muffled), minimal car and bus activity… #
  • Embarking on daily bus ride. Wanna hear new Vladislav Delay but will end up enjoying transformed environmental sounds through @rjdj again. #
  • Finally getting stuff uploaded to flickr, mostly tagged "soundart": http://flickr.com/photos/disquietpxl #
  • Do musicians need Twitter (& the like) to survive? We're discussing @missrouge's Whuffie book & @doctorow's original: http://is.gd/1RNYF #
  • RIP, George Russell (b. 1923), third-steam jazz magnet and magnate: http://is.gd/1RkDK #
  • Back from @classicalrev show. Cool organization, dropping classical acts into unlikely venues. Heard some Telemann, had a beer. #
  • Tonight out in San Francisco's Richmond District, @classicalrev is playing a classical show at Bazaar Cafe. Wonder what's on the program. #
  • Great San Francisco gallery New Langton is in financial trouble. Details, and an opportunity to pitch in, at http://www.newlangtonarts.org. #
  • Group discussion of book Whuffie Factor (about social capital) by @missrouge at http://artsjournal.com/gap. We're applying it to the arts. #
  • RIP, Merce Cunningham (b. 1919): http://is.gd/1OV89 RT @saraivry #
  • Morning sounds: foghorns and ice cubes, hard drive and garbage truck. #
  • Did a fresh OS reinstall on my five-year-old laptop, and now it's all speedy. Imagine that. #
  • Thanks to @michaelgregoire & @eleventhvolume & Prehab, I know to look at bottom of the iTunes screen for album's length when it's selected. #
  • Stupid question of the day: How does one view in iTunes the overall length of a given album? #
  • When I wake to see two hourly @oblique_chirps in a row, I realize I don't follow enough Twitter accounts on the other side of the world. #
  • While I reset my wireless router another round of The @rhawtin Drinking Game began. He's already played AGA (& REM?). My money on Alva Noto. #

Top 10 Posts from July

Seven of the top 10 most viewed posts this past month were from the Disquiet Downstream section, one more than had been the case in June.

These range, in increasing popularity, from (1) Michael Bross‘s edits of field recordings of subways, to (2) a post commemorating the death of Danielle Baquet-Long (of the duo Celer), to (3) Alan Morse Davies‘s reworking of a 1936 recording of “Gloomy Sunday,” to (4) the textured cyberdread of 2methylBulbe1ol (aka French producer Nicolas Druoton), to (5) a found item by artist Steve Roden (a vinyl recording of the Great Stalacpipe Organ), to (6) Grassy Knoll‘s momentum-driven classic-rock mashup, to (7) percussive drones (whether or not that seems like an oxymoron) by Glenn Ryszko.

Rounding out the top 10, (8) a description of an art exhibit in Dortmund Germany, about ghost stories (with contributions by Tim Hecker and Scanner, among others), (9) a series of images of a giant microphone making its way around town, and (10) one particular week’s collected twitter.com/disquiet posts (with comments about the sound of sparking-wine riddling, Michael Mann‘s recent Public Enemies, and the eighth Parker novel, as well as an entry in my ongoing “The @rhawtin Drinking Game,” in which you try to guess what Richie Hawtin is going to DJ next, since he lists his track titles live via his Twitter account).

The Rashomon of Remixing (MP3s)

There are few pleasures as richly kaleidoscopic as the Rashomon of Remixing: the online beat battle.

Two of the foremost beat fight clubs are located at cratekings.com and stonesthrow.com. In the message boards at both sites, disparate producers, most weaned on hip-hop, take a shared sample and do with it what they will.

Consider the latest from Stones Throw — the 126th beat battle hosted by that great record label. The originating cut is a mostly instrumental bit of soul, “Look What You’ve Done to Me.” And as of this evening, more than two dozen renditions have been posted, key among them an entry by Theory Hazit that takes the initial funk and cuts it up into something just broken enough to be entirely contemporary
(MP3).

[audio:https://stlth.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/production/da5192e0-5b4f-012c-bbfa-f1948c7c9dc8/ce1fe260-5ec3-012c-d232-f102fdbc611b/Theory%20Hazit%20-%20LookWhatUMadeMeDo.mp3?Signature=r6Tb%2Bg8PDg1NmacgpEj5EizDk0A%3D&Expires=1249134489&AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82|titles=”Look What U Made Me Do”|artists=Theory Hazit]

Then there’s DJ Earl-e, who slows it to a spartan pulse, the guitar flashing past like a distant comet (MP3), and, just to single out one other fine entry, an edit by Density & Time, which ratchets up the guitar into something approximating hard rock, though the looped beat ensures it’s never mistakable for anything but raw hip-hop (MP3).

[audio:https://stlth.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/production/da5192e0-5b4f-012c-bbfa-f1948c7c9dc8/33ca6610-5c2c-012c-41b3-fe73ecf756d4/DJ%20Earl-e%20-Armstrong.mp3?Signature=irH49nqmNJknkLM7pYPb2cULBIA%3D&Expires=1249135111&AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82|titles=”Armstrong”|artists=DJ Earl-e] [audio:https://stlth.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/production/da5192e0-5b4f-012c-bbfa-f1948c7c9dc8/08664410-5f8a-012c-a9e3-f919f9b4a639/Density%20%26%20Time%20-%20Dirty%20Bong%20Blues.mp3?Signature=2EJd4J17O74cjWW52awLoxsGUtY%3D&Expires=1249135207&AWSAccessKeyId=1DHMN2J6JW2RM0N4PC82|titles=”Dirty Bong Blues”|artists=Density & Time]

View the full set of entries in chronological order at drop.io/stmbbattle126 — especially should the links above fail to function. Witness the original posts and voting at, respectively, stonesthrow.com and stonesthrow.com.