Smash Your Head On The Mashup

Sound Opinions on Chicago Public Radio (and syndicated elsewhere and available as a podcast) is becoming one of my favorite things on the "radio". This week featured a very interesting interview with mashup (for lack of a better word) artist Gregg Gillis aka Girl Talk. Gillis uses a laptop to create musical collages from loops of various popular and obscure songs. I'd heard his stuff before and it really is some of the most innovative mashup/ dj type things out there. But maybe the most interesting thing about Girl Talk is his live shows, which are total punk rock dance party insanity. The Sound Opinions guys called him the Iggy Pop of djs or something like that. Take a look at this video to get an idea what he does and see some live clips.



If you dig it, check out this cool movie of him taking a show out on the street in Montreal. And his show at Pitchfork last year got shut down due to crowd control issues. Remember, he is actually playing music live on a laptop by adding and subtracting various loops during all this.

Oh yeah, all of this music is totally illegal. In fact, Gillis records for a label called Illegal Art which is run by someone using the name Philo T. Farnsworth as a protest of copyright law. There is a very thoughtful discussion of the implications of sampling/ mashups/ whatever near the end of the Sound Opinions piece. This undated interview gives some details about the philosophy behind Illegal Art too. Interesting stuff! I'm personally all in favor of this sort of flaunting of our outdated copyright laws. And I have no problem saying that Gillis is as much of a musician as someone who plays guitar or drums or sings. What do you think?

And just to make you hungry, I had an awesome brunch of Huevos Diablos and a bloody mary at the Handlebar in Wicker Park today. Handlebar probably has my favorite brunch and bloody mary in Chicago right now. Sorry Silver Cloud fans (you know who you are). I left my phone in the car, so no documentation. But here is a picture of a spicy alligator sausage from Hot Doug's.



Hot Doug is as much of punk rock mashup artiste as Girl Talk. He just works in encased meats.

France unveils anti-piracy plan (BBS News)

I missed this last week, but the French government has stepped into the music "piracy" fracas by creating an agency to monitor file sharing.

Net firms will monitor what their customers are doing and pass on information about persistent pirates to the new independent body. Those identified will get a warning and then be threatened with either being cut off or suspended if they do not stop illegal file-sharing. French President Nicolas Sarkozy said the deal was a "decisive moment for the future of a civilised internet".

Um, OK, French president. Whatever you say. Sure, it's just France, but any government stepping into the "piracy" monitoring business is disturbing. On a few levels.

There was an interesting new piece on France and the RIAA on this week's Sound Opinions on Chicago Public Radio today.

Rhapsody DRM Free

In loading up my digital music devices for my trip, I noticed that Rhapsody now has DRM-free MP3s available for purchase instead of DRM laden Real/ WMA format tracks. Costs are .89 cents per track and $8.99 per album, generally. And not everything is available as MP3s.

I mostly use Rhapsody for the subscription streaming/ download service which is, of course, going to use DRM as it is essentially a music rental service. But adding open MP3 downloads, makes the service much more appealing. There are tracks that I would sometimes be willing to purchase, and now I most likely will.

And now back syncing Common and My Bloody Valentine.

Digital Music Articles

I recently ran across a couple of interesting aricles/ blog posts on different aspects of digital music. First is "How I Became A Music Pirate" from the Consumerist blog. It talks about the frustration of DRM and incompatability of formats from the point of view of one person's experience buying online music. There's an interesting discussion going on in the comments as well. I think DRM is a fairly bad business model for purchased (as opposed to licensed or "rented" music) and competing player/ format issues do make buying or licensing digital music unnecessarily complicated and are generally not customer friendly. But I can also see the point that the writer should made sure that the music he was purchasing would work with his player. Mabe someday Steve Jobs will lead us from the DRM wilderness (not holding my breath) but until then it's the norm. Be an educated consumer while demanding change.

The second is "The Fate of Indie Music As We Know It" from Salon (watch the ad or give em some $$$) dealing with proposed changes in the royalty structure for streaming music and internet radio. The proposed guidelines would significantly raise the royalty percentage paid to license copyrighted materials for webcasting. The basic rate would rise from .07 cents per play to .19 cents by 2010. The article puts forth a good argument as to why this hurts both music fans and smaller artists. Ironically, the royalty rates are set by the Copyright Royalty Board of the Library of Congress. I have no idea if this means the downfall of cool sites like Pandora or not if the rates go through, but something to watch. Good comments/ blog reactions on this one too.