Plz plz plz !!! Listen till the end lolllllllllllllll

RIP: A Remix Manifesto is a documentary that talks about a very popular music artist known as Girl Talk.  Girl Talk consists of one man named Gregg Gillis and he takes parts from different songs (usually popular ones) and creates new music of his own. It’s known as a mash-up artist, and according to the documentary, mash-up artists have stirred up quite a controversy with both the copyright company and the other artists they take their material from.

I’m more interested in the copyright problem mentioned in this film. Copyright problems began once the craze of a new search engine called the Internet was created.  It was easy for people to steal music, movies and images from the internet and use them to create their own mash-up piece.  Before the internet started, copyright actually encouraged people to be creative.  It wasn’t until websites like Napster began that musicians and other artists began suing and copyright had to make their laws stricter.  One thing I didn’t know about copyright was that they are now going as far as making it so you can’t copy a CD onto your computer.  So with artists like Girl Talk and the earlier artists similar to Girl Talk, known as Negative Land, they won’t be able to take pieces of music anymore, even if they go out and by the CD themselves first.

In this documentary, audiences’ attention is expressly brought to four main principles:

• Culture always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the future.
• Our future is becoming less free.
• To build free societies you must limit the control of the past.

Towards all these four above, actually, I agree with point 1&4 more. Culture always builds on the past. Whether it was composer/piano virtuoso Franz Liszt using Gypsy melodies in his compositions, Metallica borrowing song structures from Diamond Head or The Rolling Stones recording Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” as a “traditional, arranged by Keith Richards,” composers have always used previous works as inspiration for their own pieces. Also, to build free societies, we must limit the control of the past. There is the powerful example in 2001 which Brazil was forced to invoke their controversial Article 71 – that allows the government to authorize a local company to make a generic copy of a patented drug without the permission of the patent holder – in order to make anti-AIDS drugs available to its citizens, and at a lower rate. Hence, I agree what Gaylor says “Remixing the art, science and knowledge of the world’s culture is second nature to Brazilians and now it’s government policy.” But I don’t really think our future is becoming less free. And even the past somehow tries to control the future, it won’t be that easy to do so.

Overall, whether I agree or disagree with RiP: A Remix Manifesto, it does raise disturbing questions about the ownership of intellectual property versus the free exchange of ideas. It’s continually engaging, delivering its message with quick cuts and a dry wit. As the Information Age becomes less a media construct and more a reality, the notion of who owns what and why becomes an issue that everyone in the world must face. That’s why this film needs to be seen, in order to ferment discussion over how ideas should be exchanged in the Internet Age.

Here’s the link of my little Haiku~

http://bfpa.dreamhosters.com/nma2050/emong

In The Art of Noise, Russolo called for a new musical reality that introduced everyday noises of the modern world—natural and mechanical—into musical composition. He argued that the human ear had become accustomed to the speed, energy, and noise of the urban industrial sounds cape; furthermore, this new sonic palette requires a new approach to musical instrumentation and composition. Hence, he created a sensibility towards a new sonic universe and an idea of noises as music, which resonated beyond the calamity of the great wars.

Russolo stated the human ear had adapted to a new landscape of sounds associated with an industrialized world. He put forth a conception in his manifesto of a former world veiled in silence as opposed to a modern world where musical sounds could be dissonant or atonal as in some contemporary music, but also the actual sounds of machines. This new music was to be more an imitation of the world than a traditional music composed of harmony and beauty as in the Kantian notion of the sublime.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/electronic_panorama.html

The one I pick is Ivo Malec’s Spot. According to Russolo’s breaking the timbres of an orchestra down into four basic categories: bowed instruments, metal winds, wood winds, and percussion, I can tell there are some use of those categories in Malec’s music such as the sounds of water and wind. They help a lot in creating a scene and foiling atmosphere when audiences are listening to. For me, I could imagine I was in a forest or somewhere around an old castle (maybe with vampires inside LOL). I could get the mystique just because of the sound. In my opinion, music should break out of limited circle of sound and conquer the infinite variety of noise-sounds. And I truly believe technology can allow us to manipulate noises in ways that cannot have been done with earlier instruments.