This PBS Independent Lens documentary on sampling culture is a good one, and you can watch the whole thing on Youtube. Their resources and links page includes my Biz Markie blog post. Thanks Beautiful Decay for posting the videos.
Posts Tagged ‘dj’
Copyright Criminals
Monday, January 25th, 2010
DJ on the one and two
Friday, October 16th, 2009Turntablists use a record player to play records in ways they weren’t meant to be played. By speeding up, slowing down and reversing the record under the needle, a whole universe of new sounds becomes possible. This new tool is still in its early stages of development. DJs already invented the instrumental sound of hip-hop. I wonder what else they have coming.
Can robots DJ?
Sunday, August 9th, 2009Now that I have an office job, I’m spending a lot of time under headphones while I correct people’s grammar. It’s a good opportunity to explore the outer reaches of my music tastes. The office has some networked Itunes libraries heavy on the Pitchfork 500, and I have whatever I’m bringing from home. I’ve also been making my first serious adventure with internet radio. I arbitrarily picked Pandora because they have a free iphone app. The web version is nothing to write home about design-wise, but the iphone version is fun, and over wi-fi there are none of the buffering delays that have kept me from enjoying internet radio in the past.
Mashups as micro-mixtapes
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009Back in 1966, Glenn Gould predicted that recorded music would become an interactive conversation between musician and listener. He described dial twiddling as “an interpretive act.” He was wrong about the dials, but right about the main point, that technology would make listening to music more like making music. Anybody with iTunes instantly becomes a DJ. It doesn’t take much more software than that to produce your own electronica. Some copyright holders and their lawyers are feeling a lot of anguish about this development. For the rest of us, I think it’s an exciting new opportunity, a chance to restore music to its rightful and natural state as shared property, a dynamic conversation anyone can be part of. (more…)