Deconstructing Beck
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Deconstructing Beck
''Deconstructing Beck'' is a compilation album released on February 17, 1998, by an anonymous group posing as Illegal Art. The album is a compilation of 13 tracks created completely from samples of American musician Beck which, by artistic intention of the group, were not approved by Geffen Records, and its release set off a large scale legal battle between the two record labels which attracted worldwide media attention. According to cultural critic Steven Shaviro, the release of ''Deconstructing Beck'' served as a challenge to the music industry since Beck's discography prominently features samples, and paved the way for new media art that became oriented around the limitations of copyright law. Background and legacy ''Deconstructing Beck'' is a compilation of 13 tracks created by various artists. The album was produced by the anonymous sample recording label named Illegal Art which was created by an anonymous person or persons under the pseudonym Philo T. Farnsworth. The alb ...
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Experimental Music
Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include Indeterminacy in music, indeterminate music, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may also approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements. The practice became prominent in the mid-20th century, particularly in Europe and North America. John Cage was one of the earliest composers to use the term and one of experimental music's primary innovators, utilizing Indeterminacy (music), indeterminacy techniques and seeking unknown outcomes. In France, as early as 1953, Pierre Schaeffer had ...
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Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a music genre in which tracks are constructed by sampling recognizable musical works. The term was coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative", and eventually explicitly defined in the liner notes of his ''Grayfolded'' album. Plunderphonics can be considered a form of sound collage. Oswald has described it as a referential and self-conscious practice which interrogates notions of originality and identity. Although the concept of plunderphonics is seemingly broad, in practice there are many common themes used in what is normally called plunderphonic music. This includes heavy sampling of educational films of the 1950s, news reports, radio shows, or anything with trained vocal announcers. Oswald's contributions to this genre rarely used these materials, the exception being his rap-like 1975 track "Power." The process of sampling other sources is found in various genres (notably hip-h ...
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Illegal Art
Illegal Art is a sampling record label that was started in 1998. The label gained immediate notoriety from legal threats surrounding '' Deconstructing Beck'', a compilation made exclusively from sampling Beck's music. This was followed by two other theme-based compilations, ''Extracted Celluloid'' and ''Commercial Ad Hoc''. All three were co-released with Negativland's Seeland Records label and sponsored by RTMark. After these theme-based compilations, Illegal Art focused on artist releases. One of the most popular artists on the label is Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), who in 2006 released his third album, ''Night Ripper'', to critical acclaim on the label, earning a ''Wired'' magazine Rave Award a year later. Illegal Art also released the '' Steinski Retrospective'', spanning his work from 1983 to 2006. It includes the legendary "Lessons", which have been described as "one of the most desirable and prized bootleg recordings in hip hop" (Antidote). It also contains a variety of ...
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Seeland Records
Seeland Records is an independent record label created by Negativland in 1979 to release their own recordings. It is a reference to the song "Seeland" by the band Neu!, who also gave Negativland the basis for their name, Sea-Land Corporation, a freight company, (the label's logo is a parody of the company's logo) and the micro-nation of Sealand, which in early history was home to radio pirates. History Seeland largely disappeared when Negativland signed with SST Records for a time during the late 1980s and early 1990s. But after an acrimonious split with that label, Negativland revived Seeland and began releasing new recordings, not just by themselves but also by other artists (the Evolution Control Committee and John Oswald to name two) who usually shared their philosophies regarding fair use. The label was distributed by Lumberjack Mordam Distribution until 2009, when Mordam shut down. Subsequently, the band relaunched the label in 2010 with distribution from Revolver USA. ...
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Beck
Beck David Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970) is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his Experimental music, experimental and Lo-fi music, lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical collages of wide-ranging genres. He has musically encompassed Folk music, folk, funk, Soul music, soul, Hip hop music, hip hop, Electronic music, electronic, alternative rock, Country music, country, and Psychedelic music, psychedelia. He has released 14 studio albums (three of which were released on indie labels), as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Beck grew towards hip-hop and folk in his teens and began to perform locally at coffeehouses and clubs. He moved to New York City in 1989 and became involved in the city's anti-folk movement. Returning to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he cut his breakthrough single "Loser (Beck song), Loser", which became ...
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Geffen Records
Geffen Records is an American record label established by David Geffen and owned by Universal Music Group through its Interscope Geffen A&M Records imprint. Founded in 1980, Geffen Records has been a part of Interscope Geffen A&M since 1999 and has been used by Universal Music as a syndicating division, serving its purpose to operate as a premier label for many new releases since 2003 and its 2017 reboot and at the same time to reissue many releases from recording labels such as Decca Records (exclusively the American pop/rock catalog), Kapp Records, DreamWorks Records, MCA Records, Uni Records, Chess Records, Almo Sounds (Interscope has managed reissues of the label in 2015), Dot Records, and ABC Records (primarily its pop, rock, and R&B recordings). The label has released significant recordings from artists including Elton John, Kylie Minogue, Enya, Counting Crows, Cher, Guns N' Roses, Tesla (band), Tesla, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, Aerosmith, Neil Young, Peter Gabriel, Donna S ...
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Steven Shaviro
Steven Shaviro (; born April 3, 1954) is an American academic, philosopher and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a PhD from Yale in 1981, and teaches Film, Culture and English, first at the University of Washington, and now at Wayne State University. Work His most widely read book is ''Doom Patrols'', a "theoretical fiction" that outlines the state of postmodernism during the early 1990s, using poetic language, personal anecdotes, and creative prose. He has also written extensively about music videos as an artform. Shaviro has written a book about film theory, ''The Cinematic Body'', which according to the preface is "about postmodernism, the politics of human bodies, constructions of masculinity, and the aesthetics of masochism." It also examines Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection and the dominance of Lacanian tropes in contemporary academic film theory. According to ...
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New Media Art
New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of new media, electronic media technology, technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D printing, and cyborg art. The term defines itself by the thereby created artwork, which differentiates itself from that deriving from conventional visual arts (i.e. architecture, painting, sculpture, etc.). New Media art has origins in the worlds of science, art, and performance. Some common themes found in new media art include databases, political and social activism, Afrofuturism, feminism, and identity, a ubiquitous theme found throughout is the incorporation of new technology into the work. The emphasis on medium is a defining feature of much contemporary art and many art schools and major universities now offer majors in "New Genres" or "New Media" and a growing number of graduate programs have emerged international ...
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Copyright Law
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States. Some jurisdictions require "fixing" copyrighted works in a tangible form. It is often shared among multiple authors, each of whom holds a set of rights to use or license the work, and who are commonly referred to as rights holders. These rights frequently include reproduction, control over derivative works, distribution, public performance, and moral rights such as attribution. Copyrights can be granted by public law and are in that case considered "territorial rig ...
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Philo T
Philo of Alexandria (; grc, Φίλων, Phílōn; he, יְדִידְיָה, Yəḏīḏyāh (Jedediah); ), also called Philo Judaeus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt. Philo's deployment of allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy was the first documented of its kind, and thereby often misunderstood. Many critics of Philo assumed his allegorical perspective would lend credibility to the notion of legend over historicity. Philo often advocated a literal understanding of the Torah and the historicity of such described events, while at other times favoring allegorical readings. Though never properly attributed, Philo's marriage of Jewish exegesis and Stoic philosophy provided a formula later picked up by other Midrash content from the 3rd and 4th centuries. Some claimed this lack of credit or affinity for Philo by the Rabbinic leadership at the time, was due to his adoption of alle ...
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Sampling (music)
In sound and music, sampling is the reuse of a portion (or sample) of a sound recording in another recording. Samples may comprise elements such as rhythm, melody, speech, sounds or entire bars of music, and may be layered, equalized, sped up or slowed down, repitched, looped, or otherwise manipulated. They are usually integrated using hardware ( samplers) or software such as digital audio workstations. A process similar to sampling originated in the 1940s with '' musique concrète'', experimental music created by splicing and looping tape. The mid-20th century saw the introduction of keyboard instruments that played sounds recorded on tape, such as the Mellotron. The term ''sampling'' was coined in the late 1970s by the creators of the Fairlight CMI, a synthesizer with the ability to record and play back short sounds. As technology improved, cheaper standalone samplers with more memory emerged, such as the E-mu Emulator, Akai S950 and Akai MPC. Sampling is a foundation of ...
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Evolution Control Committee
The Evolution Control Committee (The ECC) is an experimental music band based in Columbus, Ohio. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson (a.k.a. TradeMark G.) in Columbus, in 1986. They create music that falls within the borders of the sound collage genre, as it typically uses uncleared and illegal samples from various sources as a form of protest against copyright law. The ECC also produces numerous audio experiments, such as the disfiguring of compact discs in live performance, known as "CDestruction", and has produced a few video works as well, ranging from re-edited 50's corporate shorts to Teddy Ruxpin reciting the works of William S. Burroughs. Other activities include culture jamming. They are one of the pioneers of the mash-up or bootleg, where two or more songs are mixed together into a new track. According to Neil Strauss in ''The New York Times'', "...many musical observers trace the official beginnings of the British bootleg scene to The Evolution Control Commit ...
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