“The archive, which enables things to
be done and elicits reflections on such doings
at the same time, develops a kind of cognition,
learning new approaches as it goes along. As an
artistic endeavour, Open Music Archive does not
simply involve creating something and then moving
on to the next project: rather, it maintains the
integrity of what it produced in the past as
a potential constituent part of everything that
will be made from it in the future. In an era of
accelerated trends and ultra-disposability, the
endeavour’s commitment to its own ongoing
constitution is cause for wonder.”
Ellen Mara De Wachter
Something New: Commissioned Texts FVU, 2019
As with previous Open Music Archive projects, Everything I Have Is Yours brings people directly into the creative nucleus of the work. Recollecting a formative moment in their lives, the film project encourages a diverse range of musicians based in Manchester and now in their 70s and 80s, to reconnect with the music of their youth and play together. Collective acts of live performance interact with digital technology to recall archive sounds from the musicians’ teenage pasts. Shot in a space that operates somewhere between a recording studio, live venue and practice room, the camera continuously tracks through the groups of musicians brought together for the project. This looping camera move mirrors looped samples worked around by the assembled players. The samples are from 1950s and 1960s shellac and vinyl chart hit records – each record, on playback, conjuring particular sonic qualities from the era. Copyright-expired elements of the original records are separated out, through an algorithmic process, to enable collective future sharing. Referencing the history of sample culture, which saw musicians and producers routinely sample from commercial hit favourites from previous generations, the film is a vivid sonic conversation, an intergenerational call and response that traverses the private, personal and public.
“It is hip-hop ghosted by Morton Feldman. Musique concrète dreamt by Doris Day. Alvin Lucier interrupted by Madlib. Lee Scratch Perry times Sol Lewitt. The Beverley Sisters watched by Jean-Luc Godard.
Delia Derbyshire orbiting Flying Lotus. Vini Reilly slow dancing with Slauson Malone. None of that, at least outside of my own forged-in-Manchester pop critic imagination, because this event exists outside of music, even as it revels in it, music as a technological revelation and a magical communication, as an endlessly malleable artistic material.”
Paul Morley
Everything I Have Is Yours: Commissioned Texts. FVU, 2019
Once Heard Before was developed with a group of young beat-makers and MCs from East London, who mutate fragments of sounds and lyrics ripped from top ten records from the 1950s and 1960s. Their sound work features on a series of lathe-cut records, presented alongside a video of their rap performances. Source material morphs into new creative outputs: artists and performers imagine a new music vocabulary, across generations and technologies, towards an archive of future sounds.
Eileen Simpson and Ben White’s project takes as its starting point the Institute of Popular Music (IPM) Archive of over 80,000 records, an exceptional and rich research resource, gifted over a number of years by collectors and enthusiasts. With a particular focus on copyright-expired hit records from 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s, the artists temporarily re-house the IPM archive in the public gallery - putting the archive on public view and making its contents available for public use. The project explores ownership in the archive, investigating what is owned and how it is owned and promotes expanded usership of the archive through replay, live events, digitisation and distribution. At the centre of the exhibition is a bespoke open source structure for archive digitisation, broadcast and remix performance, designed with 51 architecture. Animated by University of Liverpool students and graduates, the exhibition space is transformed into a production site where out-of-copyright sounds are ripped from archive records, to generate an evolving public resource. This resource is used as material for a series of public events with invited guests and collaborators.
Auditory Learning is part of Eileen Simpson & Ben White’s ongoing project to generate public resources, using the archive as a vehicle for collaborative activity. Using tactics of hacking and gleaning they explore legal loopholes to find and distribute out-of-copyright archive material for their Open Music Archive.
In the spirit of the 1960s project of the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, to make contemporary art freely accessible to the widest audience, the artists produce an archive of recorded sounds - auditory traces of activity in the gallery, available for use by a future public, without restriction and beyond the scope of the current copyright term. Tape hiss, voices, musical fragments, audience shuffles and applause, recorded at past public events, are digitized from videotapes and audio cassettes held in the MAO archive, to generate a new sonic inventory. The artists process the archival sounds using emerging information retrieval technologies, to create a bank of source material and a new work for exhibition. A series of live events with invited collaborators, reanimate these sounds on a specially assembled platform. The events will be recorded and released with copyleft licenses.
For their new live artwork Local Recall: An Ancoats Recital, Eileen Simpson and Ben White (Open Music Archive) explore the ghostly echoes that persist through repetition in the playback of music and draw a line between the model industrial city of the late 19th Century and post-industrial Manchester of the early 1990s. Their new audio visual work, Local Recall is constructed using the algorithmic logic of the search query to source archive material from Manchester created between 1892 and 1992 and to rip and re-assemble material from public sources - ranging from footage of workers leaving the factory to videos of young ravers. The film is accompanied by a live soundtrack, produced and performed by Graham Massey, founding member of 808 State. In the specially commissioned soundtrack, 1890s music material, ripped from piano rolls, is re-assembled using exclusively 1990s MIDI music technology.
Playhead builds on an ongoing project initiated for 17th Biennale of Sydney (2010), taking as a starting point the 1952 release Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music. The project brings together alternative public domain versions of tracks from the anthology, from non-attributed folk versions and covers to commercial recordings whose proprietary interests have expired. New copyleft iterations are simultaneously generated from elements of the archive material. Through scrutiny of the public/private status of the archive, its ownerships and freedoms, Playhead assembles a parallel anthology tracing the rights that subsist within recorded material, that prevent or open access and creates a platform for the re-circulation of collectively-authored sonic material - to open out the archive as resource for the future. Pursuing lines of enquiry provoked by Smith's erratic collection, encountering voices conjured from past, the project envisages the anthology as a series of nodes in a larger network and employs a kind of sonic virology - tracing songs across spatial and temporal distances. The viral nature of folk ensures the inexorable spread of the material, which overlaps with contemporary practices of remix, sampling and peer-to-peer exchange.
ATL 2067 imagines a future Atlanta. The project reanimates music recordings fixed during the early days of the recording industry produced in temporary studios in hotel rooms and function rooms across the city of Atlanta – and controlled under copyright in the USA until 2067. Late 1920s Atlanta witnessed a flurry of recording activity, with labels travelling south from New York collect music of the surrounding area – from blues to cajun folk via country. At this moment, collectively-authored music and lyrics were locked to apparent authors and fixed to the commodity form of the gramophone record. Working with local hip-hop producers, 78rpm recordings from the 1920s were reassembled into the rhythmic matrix of rap beats. Folk cultures of the beginnings of the 20th Century plugged directly into the beat cultures of the beginnings of the 21st – rap, trap, and ghetto-tech. A street-level sound system was installed at the corner of Walker's Street and Peter's Street in Castleberry Hill. Local emcees were invited to host - performing as Master of Ceremonies - to extend an open mic invitation to the Atlanta public who were invited to rap about the future of the city. For five hours people stepped from the crowd to improvise a freestyle rap cypher over the future beats. The project reactivates archival material generated by an early 20th Century Georgia public by inserting it back into the rhythmic milieu of contemporary Atlanta to collectively envisage and perform a potential future. The temporary sound system and assembled public occupied an optimistic future – 2067, the year that the collectively authored material will finally return to public ownership and envisaged an imminent public domain.
Shot on location in Mexico City, Open House | Divided Estates takes as its starting point the intimate spaces of Casa Barragán, the former home of architect Luis Barragán, and his idiosyncratic collection of vinyl records. Shelves of vinyl, record turntables and speaker systems are installed in almost every room in Barragán’s house, including hidden speakers in the garden. The film reanimates the architect's extensive record collection through playback, choreographed camera moves and lip synch. Open House | Divided Estates attempts to open out the public domain territory of Barragán’s record collection while exploring the grey zone of the building's image rights. The film explores both the complex web of propriety rights locked within the vinyl collection and images of the house in relation to their legal position and public access.
The Brilliant and the Dark interrogates proprietary rights that reside within archive material and tests the portability of open source methodologies to wider creative contexts – imagining the archive as source material and reenacting and remixing this source through collective female voice. At its centre is the idea of the freeing the artist/author from the conditions of the market by using the viral logic of copyleft to allow open collaboration with others and embracing this process to generate unknown, unpredictable outcomes and potentials. The Brilliant and the Dark takes as a starting point a cantata for women’s voices, of the same name, composed by Malcolm Williamson and Ursula Vaughan Williams, and first performed by 1,000 women volunteers at the Royal Albert Hall in 1969. Through negotiation with copyright owners, music publishers Josef Weinberger, artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White secured permissions for the elements of the original 1969 score to be used as a basis for a new work. An invitation to 22 piece women's choir Gaggle to participate in the new copyleft work that explored remix and reenactment through pre-recorded and live performance, resulted in the composition of a new work for women's voices – taking lyrics, melodic phrases and rhythms from the original and paralleling the operatic format. A new film mimics the methodology of the music video as a site of pre-recorded playback and live lip synch and appropriates the tactics of the promotional music video. The film re-animates the 1969 performance by re-staging moments documented in photographs of the event held in the Women's Library collection - from backstage preparations to choreographed movements from the live performance. The performers are seen in new costumes referencing the originals and amidst remade props. The archive reenactment takes place in The Women's Library, the space which functions to protect the material that informed the resulting work and provides the location for the video shoot.
As the first Jordanian audio-visual works begin to fall into the public domain, a constellation of interests are translating, drafting and revising copyrights laws, trade agreements and licences to control the flow of culture and build new markets. Against the backdrop of these emerging intellectual property markets, in 2008 artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White embarked on a period of research in Amman, Jordan – speaking to lawyers, copyright activists, software developers, artists, musicians, journalists, curators, filmmakers and critics – in an attempt to seek out the common cultural resources of Jordan’s public domain. The result is Struggle in Jerash – a project convened around a lost 1957 Jordanian feature film of the same name, which fell out of copyright the year of the artists’ residency, and is used as a catalyst to explore value and meaning in archival material. Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White re-animate Struggle in Jerash by appropriating the tactic of the commercial DVD director’s commentary, subverting its standard authorial voice and placing the audience at the centre of a copyright-expired film. In 2008, whilst on residency at Makan House in Amman, Jordan, the artists gained access to the last surviving copy of Struggle in Jerash, a VHS transfer of the original 35mm film. Part 1950s gangster flick and part tourist documentary, the 1957 film is set in historical Jordan and Jerusalem and was produced by a self-organised group of aspiring filmmakers. The artists watched the film with Amman-based artists, curators, filmmakers and critics, inviting them to both translate and provide live commentary. Each session was recorded and edited to assemble a new multi-voiced soundtrack, creating a new film. A multiplicity of parallel commentaries emerge, anchored to the real-time of this remarkable footage of 1950s Jordan. As we are guided through the film, exclamations and reactions echo from one voice to another while laughter erupts and resonates across the composite group. Remarks on shifting borders, liberty, politics, everyday life, national identity, religion and cinema collide, forming an intricate discussion that reveals the discursive potential of the material. Although notorious as the country’s first feature, the original film has not until now been in general circulation. In deciding to redistribute the film, the artists make a reciprocal gesture, ensuring that they return the original film – and offer their new work – to the public sphere.
“The point of interrogation is shifted from an attempt to reconfigure producer-consumer relations to instead focus on the mediating term of circulation. The result is that the status of the author ceases to be the main point of interrogation, as is so often the case in works trafficking in found materials. Instead, the travels of the image become paramount, particularly the reproduction of images across formats and beyond their sanctioned and/or intended uses. But against the utopia of free circulation, Simpson and White cannily balance a conception of whatever ‘image commons’ may exist as a contested ground under increasing threat.”
Erika Balsom on Struggle in Jerash
(Balsom, E., 2017. “Copyright and the Commons” in After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation. Columbia University Press.)
Free-to-air centres around an invitation for bands and musicians to perform covers, versions and interpretations of the 1920s and 30s out-of-copyright folk, blues, and jazz from the Open Music Archive. A series of live plugged and unplugged performances took place in the Cornerhouse gallery at 5pm daily and were broadcast live on a temporary FM radio station and streamed online. Performances were recorded and licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike, generating a new resource - free for use and reuse in the future. For two weeks Free-to-air opened up a temporary channel for music, exchange and discussion that operated beyond individual proprietary and commercial interests - a series of truly free broadcasts.