RIFF MARKET

RIFFMARKET TO RELAUNCH AS REMIX WEBSITE
"I WILL REMIX ANYTHING--ANYTHING" HE SAYS
ALL REMIXES FINAL

Sorry to beat Status Ain't Hood to the following sentiment--I'm sure you were looking forward to his "Remixes: Please Break Up" headline as much as I was--plus I like to think I'm as much a save-the-sample frontliner type in the war against creatively inhibitive copyright as the next halfassing blogger, parents just don't understand and all that, but: YIKES. This is just a waste, in service of I don't know what, and the worst part is people actually like it.

Months ago I was talking to Elliot about the energy of this new-rave / franco-filter-metal / Edbanger-Institubes / joycore-remix-mashup-mp3mixtape / bloghouse scene, how indie rock had ceased to be participatory and how extremely participatory the bloghouse scene was in contrast. People are not only listening and then telling all their friends how awesome everything is, but now the technologies are so cheap and easy to use that they are actively modifying the music, chopping it up and blending it and sending it to Discobelle with no small hopes of online bigtime. The entry-level audio technologies people are using too aren't that far off from the popular blogger softwares if you think about it, your Bloggers and Livejournals and Typepads and to a lesser extent Wordpresses that more or less automate the process so you don't have to learn CSS styles and PHP, i.e. all you need to do is shit out your text and hit publish, with no understanding of how that text is manipulated to appear on the screen before you. So the speed with which these unofficial remixes are coming about, it's just unbelievable, and somewhat of a dare too, i.e. if you're really so into Digitalism, why haven't you remixed them yet?

Let me just say again that I find all this really exciting in principle, really awesome too to see this sort of interaction serving as an outsiders gateway into dance music. And maybe the obvious decision to make here is just stop listening to all the awful remixes that glut the internet, that speed up the rate of audio consumption, i.e. it's not like these remixes are actively destroying the originals, though admittedly sometimes I feel that way, e.g. Diplo's "Someone Great"/"My Love" mash. But come the fuck on! This is the Internet! All of us--me, you, everybody--have a duty to find things, and have opinions about these things, and give these things arbitrary numerical values, as quickly and as often as possible.

So! My guess is most of these remixes, most of which are awful, are in fact fan-generated, i.e. executed by people self-trained technically and musically, who have an "ear" for things and trust their ears in composition, but most importantly trust their technologies to do most of the heavy-lifting for them: pitchmatching, beatmatching, providing with soundbanks and loops and the ability to tweak these loops within audible parameters, etc. More like babies dressing up Barbie dolls than a different babies playing with Lego bricks, and that is no slight to either, i.e. all my Barbie-playing baby readers, I want absolutely zero shit outta you.

Where I'm going with this is more of a question, and my own kind of dare, to keep kids off remixes obviously but something more than that too hopefully, which is: you'd think people would be embarrassed to put some of this remix stuff out there in the condition it's in, more a collection of preset and loop dressing than any purposeful reconsideration of a tune. Plus I imagine we'll get to the point that these fans aren't even technically the "remixers"--they are merely the vessels through with their entry-level audio software programs are expressing themselves. I'm sure the savvier among you can already spot these earmarks pretty quickly actually.

Like hell I'm going to tell people to stop participating with the musics they love; there are already enough permanently worthless cranks out there who, in between self-loathing cracks about the size of Ultragrrrl's titties, are complaining about everything all the time anyway. More a phenomenon I'm generally interested in, manifesting itself in a young person's culture, etc., i.e. when technology moves from superstar enabler to superstar itself, from aiding art production to crippling it. You know me!



50 RIFFS

Download: Jackson Jones' "I Feel Good, Put Your Pants On" (Pilooski Edit) [zshare]

Labels: copyright, dance, internet, music, remix, technology