Re:TheAshLad - Sandbooks

And it was these particular. samples which in led CBS Records and the
Canadian Record. Industry Association to take action despite the phrase
'Not For. Sale' appearing on the cds and the fact that they were
distributed. free of charge. Nor have the minutely detailed 'credits' on
each. album been enough to get the composer out of trouble. In a
subsequent. work called 'Plexure' Oswald attempted to assemble five
thousand. fragments by five thousand famous pop stars changing their
names but. leaving them recognizable e.g. 'Sinead O'Connick' or
'Bing. Stingspreen' and working on the progressive speed of the entire.
piece.(). 'It's a work on the recognizability of information seeing that
in. the end there are so many familiar starting points that the memory.
quite literally gets lost in its own meanderings' as Oswald himself. says
although he regrets that in music 'there is no convention about. putting
in quotation marks as is done when quoting a text'.. Overzealous
bureaucracy aside it really would be twisted thinking. consider these
sound works as a theft of intellectual property. because purchasing the
support on which the original works are. recorded also means
purchasing the right to listen. David Toop an. English journalist and
author of 'Ocean of Sounds' stresses that the. purchaser of an album
also pays for the right to ignore the artist's. intentions completely to
massacre the product as much as they like. and to listen in a variety of
creative ways thus changing it. utterly.() The latter is markedly
different from what is commonly. called plagiarism since it is a new
reprocessing of the material. used treating the digital samples as a
violinist uses the notes. written on a stave. This is also the attitude of
the label 'Illegal. Art' supported by media activists RTMark which
issued the famous. 'Deconstructing Beck' an album obtained by
sampling and. restructuring tracks by the musician Beck and obviously
alerting the. lawyers of GeffenBMG. Notice of the decision to sue was
sent by. email since the only way of contacting the mysterious label
was an. email address. Even more incredibly BMG did not yet have a
copy of. the cd (. copies had been pressed and quickly sold) and so.
based their demands and threats on the 'word of mouth' echoing
around. the internet.. The next work by Illegal Art was 'Extracted
Celluloid' a brilliant. collage of samples of film music used 'in direct
opposition to the. sound clichs they were taken from'. It is an
exemplary work in the. deconstruction of tunes remembered by most
people living in Western. countries with samples from such soundtracks
as 'Titanic' 'Saturday. Night Fever' 'The Wizard Of Oz' and 'Dr.
Strangelove'. Yet again. this shows that digital files are not only a
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