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Date:
4 June 2005
Duration: 2 hours
Venue: Tate Modern
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Loca Records
| Loca Records presentation and DVD screening (streaming video) |
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Loca Records are a UK based, record distribution company. LOCA believes that the fight over Free/Libre and Open Content
and Media is a struggle over the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech, radically opening up the possibilities of media.
To this end LOCA is releasing music under copyleft, a license that enables music writers to develop music collaboratively
and equitably and then release it into the commons. Using these licenses LOCA hopes to provide the control necessary to prevent
cynical exploitation of work that is released in this open way and to encourage others to do the same. Loca hope that musicians
who contemplate using the work released in this manner will honour the license and release their work under a public license
resulting in a radical rejection of the whole capitalist ethos of these multinational media corporations.
Meme
Open Source EP album cover |
© David Meme, 2005 |
In October 2005, on the Loca label, MEME released a Free/Libre/Open Source Album titled Open Source EP. (cover image and live performance by Meme above)
In context of Open Congress Online Events have highlighted this new release from David Meme, making available different versions of material, for exclusive download from Tate Online, in conjunction with the Open Source EP release.
"I am very much influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, particularly their books 'Anti-Oedipus' and 'Thousand Plateaus'. In these works, Deleuze & Guattari attempt to highlight the multiplicity and contingent nature of the world and replicate that flux in their philosophy. The idea of capturing contingency (rather like the work of Sartre, particularly in 'Nausea') is very exciting but also equally tragic. We will ultimately fail in the endeavour as the fixation of reality, by its very process, destroys contingency. However, at that nexus, between contingency and fixation, I believe that creativity lies. In the tiny random moments, that substantively transform a track from something banal, to that which sparkles with a thousand tiny lights. They believe that they can write philosophy like music, and I wonder if we can write music like philosophy." David Meme
Further Information on Open Source EP downloads
Descriptions for each track and a summery of concepts within the work... by David Meme
Drug of Choice (featuring Lisa Xan)
Drug of Choice is the most developed and 'finished' piece. I really like working with splintered and fragmented drum tracks and contrasting them with a strong narrative vocal line. Here Lisa Lindley-Jones (aka Xan) provides some really evocative lyrics, which I then sample, cut up and montage together. The juxtaposition of vocal lines really produces interesting and challenging lines (as both Bowie and Burroughs, who use this technique, show in their work respectively). By pulling and pushing the different phrases, the stability and coherence of the original texts are thrown apart, this has amazing effects in terms of meaning, and can create really inspiring and captivating narrative.
Cartoons (featuring Arecee)
Cartoons was a collaboration with a New York rapper, Arecee, who sent me some vocal lines to play with. These I sampled into the computer, and began to piece together with different instrument sounds and drum programming. Again this is actually a rather early cut, but has a very polished feel which is one of the mysteries of writing music. Arecee sent me the vocal lines in .wav format from New York on a CD which I loaded into Logic Pro. The beats and snare samples are drawn from the Ultrabeat virtual drum instrument in Logic. Many of the samples and sounds have been processed quite heavily and repeatedly to give them a digital sheen feel.
Intensity
Intensity is the latest track written and features my favourite kinds of sounds, including guitar harmonics, fragmented and grained beats combined with a sense of spacial reverb. Intensity was really trying to explore the modulation of affect through these sounds, and I think most of all it is trying to capture a sense of the tragic. The lightness of being (which is thought to come through a purging of emotions), but also a still heaviness in that something momentous has or will occur (but we do not know what it could be). These types of feeling can be associated with the tragic sensibility. I have not attempted to use a tragic form for the arrangement, I am more interested in capturing the 'feeling' of tragedy, the sadness and sense of loss, but also the sense of escape or freedom.
Ben White - Out of copyright DJ set
| Ben White - Out of copyright DJ set (streaming video) |
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Ben White and Eileen Simpson have been working on a project researching and collecting music that has fallen out of copyright and is now in the public domain. This music will be distributed freely through a website that at the time of this recording was still under construction.
For Open Congress, Ben played a short DJ set of music made entirely of samples from the collected recordings, mainly sourced from 1920s 78rpm records. An accompanying slideshow uncovered the process of tracking the material.
Licensing
All contributions have been made to Open Congress, under an Attribution-Non-Commercial Share-Alike 2.0 (UK - England and Wales) Creative Commons Licence. As licenced via a contributors agreement with the original author.
Terms of the Licence: You are free to copy and distribute the work in conjunction with this licence. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. See here for further information on Creative Commons.
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