An MP3 copy of
Monkey Plus One's "The Art of Sampling" can be downloaded
at http://www.geocities.com/radiohack.
MP3.com's PR
flacks failed to respond to repeated requests for comment
for this article.
According to
Michael McCready, a Chicago music lawyer who runs the Web
site music-law.com, any sample must pass copyright muster,
even if it is unrecognizable.
Eric Prado is a thief. Or at least, that's one way to look
at it.
Prado is a DJ, working Portland's electronic and experimental
circuits under the name Monkey Plus One. As such, he uses
samples, existing sounds hijacked for his own purposes.
To anyone who follows current music, that's nothing special.
But to those who place copyrights before creativity, it
makes him a plagiarist at best and a pirate at worst.
It seems a safe bet that Prado wouldn't run from either
description. In fact, he might just claim them both with
pride.
"There's a movement of people who want to redefine plagiarism
from something negative into a new way to create," says
Prado.
Musicians wielding samplers can do most anything with any
piece of recorded sound they come across: cut it, paste
it, stretch it, grind it, manipulate it beyond recognition.
They can also just appropriate well-known snippets wholesale,
dropping samples into their work to create instant references
to their source material.
To some, that's not too far removed from, say, the willful
juxtaposition of unrelated objects in old Surrealist collages.
To others, it's outright theft. Even though sampling has
been a vital part of the musical landscape for 20-odd years,
the latter group has the law on its side. Musicians who
want to sample legally usually have to pay for the privilege,
even if their work bears little resemblance to its sources.
To Prado and other artists who believe that old-fashioned
definitions of copyright hamper free expression in an age
of free-flowing bits and bytes, that's absurd.
"We're bombarded by media and information all day, everyday,
and sampling is just a way to turn it on its head," he says.
"We have a right to recombine material we find out in the
culture to make something new."
To that end, Prado composed a 16-minute track called "The
Art of Sampling." With percolating beats and crackling found
sounds underscoring a chorus of voices reading a lengthy
essay by Prado, the track explicitly explores the politics
and aesthetics of sampling. Ultimately, it calls for a sharply
critical look at sample-based music.
At its most frantic, the track can sound like a radio detonating
inside your head, but its artistic intent is pretty clear.
Prado had friends record parts of the essay on his voicemail.
The music draws on hundreds of samples from a sonic stash
built over 10 years; Prado says even he doesn't remember
where some of the stuff came from. Certainly, nothing leaps
out as instantly recognizable.
Still, when Prado first tried to post the track on MP3.com,
one of the leading online sources for free music, the Web
site's mandarins rejected it without much explanation.
"I thought, wouldn't it be great to have an audio documentary,
demonstrating how the instrument works," he says. "I hadn't
really done it as an outright attack on copyright law, so
I was pretty surprised when I got this generic e-mail back
saying that they wouldn't allow the song on their site unless
I removed all the samples--which would have left me with
nothing but the voices."
Prado resorted to posting the track on other Web sites
and getting the word out himself, until MP3.com precipitously
changed its mind last week. Again, the decision came without
explanation, raising the question of just how such sites
will treat artists in an era in which they might replace
record companies as music's gatekeepers. The issue is particularly
important when it comes to potentially controversial, political
work. What's the Web site's policy? In this case, your guess
is as good as any.
"When you take sampling and combine it with MP3, it's like
piling a controversy on top of a controversy," Prado acknowledges.
"What I'm trying to do is promote a critical outlook on
artists who are using sampling. There are people out there
who are just thieves riding on the work of others.
"And then there are people who are recombining sounds into
something new."
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Willamette Week | originally
published May 10,
2000
|
