p2pnet.net Music News:- He who fights the future has a dangerous enemy - Kierkegaard

The Grey Album Grey Day was a phenomenon that caught everyone by surprise.

DJ Danger Mouse created his Grey Album tapping Jay-Z’s Black Album and The Beatles’ White Album for source material.

Britain’s EMI - a founding member of the Big Five record - went totally ballistic. It rigidly controls all Beatles sound recordings for Capitol Records and, through a New York law firm, fired off a barrage of threatening letters to everyone carrying the Grey Album on their sites.

The media had a field day. EMI had egg on its face. And, by default, so did every other member of the Big Five recorded music cartel.

And it’s not over yet.

Claire Chanel and Scary Sherman were among the millions of people who were watching and they decided to show that the Grey Album wasn’t created in isolation, but was one of many remixes to hit after the Black Album acapellas became widely available.

The result was their Jay-Z Construction Set toolkit with everything you’ll need, including software, to create a new remix of Jay-Z’s Black Album.

But there’s more. “The remix process is accessible to any comfortable PC user with an internet connection,” Claire told p2pnet. “We’re hoping to inspire new artists to contribute music to the rising cacophony.”

Here’s the timeline, as described by Clair:

• 10 Feb : Danger Mouse served C+D. At this point, I have a DJ gig coming up so I plan to give away CD-Rs of the Grey Album as a local response.
• 19 Feb : Grey Tuesday is announced. Scary and I toy with the idea of compiling a CD of all the Black Album remixes we can find.
• 23 Feb : Grey Tuesday participants served a C+D. We decide to ramp up the CD project, conceive the Jay-Z Construction Set and start working on it.
• The projected “safe” release date is March 16.
• 04 Mar : MTV News runs a piece on the Jay-Z Construction Set catching us by surprise. We’re forced into overdrive, stay up all night, and finish the project the next day.

Aside from Claire and Scary’s writing and cataloging, all the contents of the Jay-Z Construction Set were available online so, says Claire, “Our work on the Jay-Z Construction Set is best categorized as ‘metadata’.

“We’ve taken the products of disparate groups operating on the internet and illustrated how they can be used together. Vintage synth enthusiasts put audio samples online. Jay-Z fans scan photos from magazines. Music addicts upload tracks from the latest mix CDs. Software from the free-software community puts the tools on the users’ desktops. It’s as if the JZCS is a mix CD with samples from all over the internet itself.”

From all over the Internet itself. 

Are you paying attention, Big Music? Because all 649 megs the toolkit are being distributed online through p2p filesharing networks and protocols such as Bram Cohen’s BitTorrent. Or you can get it on a CD.

OK.

In the meanwhile, with the Grey Album, everyone knew who everyone else was. Clair Channel and Scary Sherman are pretty funny names. But why bother?

“Our pseudonyms serve multiple purposes,” says Claire.

“Primarily, we want to create a disconnect between the artist and the work. While we initiated the Jay-Z Construction Set, it’s no longer ‘ours’ in any sense. We’re not distributing it at all and we have no control over how future users will alter its contents. Ideally, people will use the tools we’ve provided to create their own tracks and include them with the archive as they pass it along.

“The decentralized nature of BitTorrent mirrors the bottom-up nature of the Jay-Z Construction Set.

“It was initially a concern that the BitTorrent learning curve would stymie the spread of the Jay-Z Construction Set.

“Fortunately, people were able to pick it up easily enough and within twenty-four hours of the first seed, there were hundreds of people clustered together sharing the files.”

That’s where things are at the moment. But it’s not the end.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2004 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 8095 times