Future Projects

PROPOSAL FOR OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE/ EXYZT LFA 2008

Open Music Archive propose a live event in June 2008 - hosted from the Exyzt installation at South Bank.

The live event will consist of a copyleft DJ Scratch showcase by world class scratch DJs Parkertron and Woody. Throughout the performance they will use the open source vinyl battle tool made by Open Music Archive*. This performance will be followed by a DJ battle with local scratch DJs – invited to participate via flyers and posters distributed around the local area.

The showcase and the battle will be connected to a weekend youth workshop programme delivered in collaboration with south London based artists organisation Gasworks.

• This project is a development of the Open Music Archive project DECLOSE for Disclosures (April 2008) for which Eileen Simpson & Ben White are pressing 500 copies of a free 12" vinyl scratch tool featuring out-of-copyright archive jazz, blues, folk and brand new copyleft beats by: Breakplus, Collection Society, The Early Man, Trevor Goodchilde, Parkertron, The Red Eyed Thief, Steve Science, Soundspecies.

The artists promote collaboration and seek to explore its significance and value for creative production. For the project during LFA in June 2008 – the artists will freely distribute copies of the battle vinyl to the local community to invite scratch DJs to participate in the project. This builds on and extends the collaborative process – for stage one - they invited producers and members of the Burnt Progress community to create the new remix tracks, short vocal snippets, percussive noises, samples, breaks and beats featured on the battle vinyl.

The Exyzt intervention in Southwark and South Bank would be a perfect context in which to explore the potential of the forgotten/derelict music and re-animating it through a live event.

BACKGROUND TO THE OPEN SOURCE TURNTABLE PROJECT:Collaboration is central to the activity of the DJ who constantly combines, re-works and extends existing creative output. In the hands of a turntablist, the record player is revealed as a hardware instrument – one that needs vinyl software to operate. The DJ’s instrument can only be activated using a set of vinyl tools, in the same way that computer hardware requires an operating system and a suite of software to function. Unlike the conventional battle record, which samples unlicensed commercial recordings, the newly created scratch tools for Declose are assembled entirely from out-of-copyright material – and so exist outside commercial and bootleg economies. The project adopts the form and structure of the battle record to build open vinyl code – which, like free/libre and open source software, is distributed freely.The project encourages open creative exchange and demands that subsequent creations are licensed under identical terms.

BACKGROUND TO OPEN MUSIC ARCHIVE: The Open Music Archive is situated within the current discourse surrounding notions of authorship, ownership and distribution, reanimated by a porting of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to wider creative contexts. The Open Music Archive concerns itself with the public domain and creative works which are not owned by any one individual and are held in common by society as a whole. Under copyright law, a music recording has two automatically assigned property rights: A musical composition has a property right and a recording has a separate and independent property right. These property rights are limited by term. In the UK, the term of copyright in a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work is limited to the life of the author plus 70 years, while the term of copyright in a sound recording is limited to 50 years from the date of recording. The archive attempts to gather recordings and information about recordings whose proprietary interests have expired and make them accessible to a wider public. Artists Ben White & Eileen Simpson have initiated this project following a series of projects which involved researching and gathering music which has fallen out of copyright. Much of this music, although legally in the public domain, is tied to physical media (for example gramophone records) and locked away in archives or private collections which are not widely accessible. The Open Music Archive aims to digitise as much of this music as possible in order to free it from the constraints of a physical collection. The project aims to share the existing resource and to build a larger archive in open collaboration with others. The archive aims to distribute this music freely, form a site of exchange of knowledge and material, and be a vehicle for future collaborations and distributed projects.

LINKS TO PREVIOUS PROJECTS:

1. Free-to-Air project at Cornerhouse with Manchester bands exploring the out-of-copyright cover version on the radio and live 15 min performances in the gallery: http://www.openmusicarchive.org/freetoair

2. DECLOSE project (developing for Gasworks in April 2008) see DJ Parkertron (Fingathing) testing the scratch record at: http://www.archive.org/details/Leverage

3. Listen to the battle tool: http://www,openmusicarchive.org/declose