Just saw the film, Rip, last weekend. The movie explores new creative modes of music-making (and other art forms) enabled by present day technologies and cultural interests. It also uses this path into the creative world to cover most of the present day struggles with copyright and notions of ownership of “intellectual property.”

Although Rip addresses a wide-range of topics and ground, one of the points it drives home better than anything is the notion of remixing and mashups as art-form (or at least our modern conception of these methods). It’s important to understand this newish sort of muscial creativity is composition (though now it’s increasingly possible to perform this way as well).

UnKindness Of Ravens started this way. We labeled our method of composition, “exposition” because our goal was to find the right elements of sounds and then structure them in such a way that they’d expose the latent music ready to be heard. UKOR happens to also create of its sounds first, so we initiate our palette, but the compositional process differs little from people that operate on the remix/mashup principles the movie highlights so well with the music-making of Girl Talk. Groups or people creating music with the remix/mashup process simply start with a different palette–one composed of sound from other sources.

The movie presented the issues in a passionate way that will capture the imaginations of many people who otherwise wouldn’t care about the misguided laws of present day “intellectual property” and their destructive force on creativity.

“RiP: A remix manifesto is an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. Created over a period of six years, the film features the collaborative remix work of hundreds of people who have contributed to this website, helping to create the world’s first open source documentary.”

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor encourages remixes of the film too.

Lots of news lately about Radiohead offering its newest album as a download (choose your own price). Saul Williams and Trent Reznor decided to do the same with their new album. They’ve made a lot of headlines, though Issa (Jane Siberry) has offered self-determined pricing for her music for some time. We’ve been offering our music online in download options of free or purchasable as high quality MP3/Ogg formats or physical CD for the last five years. I’m sure many other artists have offered their work this way but the method is getting large-scale attention and, it seems, acceptance.

UnKindness Of Ravens recently may have been heard by way of CKDU 88.1 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ron Bates’s The Threat is an “eclectic show of noise, jazz, indie rock, and other avant garde weirdness,” which presented (among exciting bits of thumb-piano joy from Konono No.1 and well-placed rock) some UKOR too. Fortunately for those who missed it, there is a podcast (episode 35 from 19 Aug 2006). It’s not just back-scratching that I’m recommending downloading the The Threat podcast (more like skin flaying), Ron’s put together a solid history of interesting music.

Need something to download podcasts? The site recommends this ipodder program (for Linux, Mac, and Windows)–I’m using a great Linux app, amaroK.

Adam Gould’s aesthetic marries mesmer with manacles of a definite love sort. This is some fine video experimentation set to Gould’s own creative mix of UKOR’s “Softs” and “Backwards Cereberal Heartbeat.” Watch it courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Cheers Adam.

A subtle note to the reader. UnKindness Of Ravens (UKOR), while a little slow is far from dead. Material in the works will provide a double album within a year.

Relieve your pressing need for Spring with the noise of myth on a Ukorian stride.
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