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Wed. December 23.1998 3:00 AM EST |
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'98's Best: Beck Deconstructor Makes Case For Illegal Song SamplingGeffen has no intention to hassle graduate student who created album of Beck samples as protest. by Correspondent Clive Young |
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Deconstructing Beck is partly inspired by Beck's use of samples in his recordings, according to CD creator Philo T. Farnsworth. |
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[Editor's note: Over the holiday season, SonicNet is looking back at
1998's top stories, chosen by our editors and writers. This story originally ran on Saturday, March 7.] Despite having blatantly defied copyright laws with the
And as it looks now, the graduate student and his CD are in the clear, according to publicist Dennis Dennehy, who handles Beck for DGC Records, the label that the artist is signed to. Dennehy said that Beck does not intend to release a statement or pursue any legal course to sue for damages or prevent distribution of the CD, Deconstructing Beck, a compilation of illegally sampled Beck songs created by several artists and manufactured by a Dartmouth music graduate-student who goes by the pseudonym Philo T. Farnsworth. (The real Philo T. Farnsworth invented, and produced the first all-electronic television system; he died in 1971.) Deconstructing Beck is a collage of previously released Beck tunes reworked into odd new permutations; the album serves as a protest of corporate control of art, Farnsworth said. "I haven't heard anything about [any plans to pursue the matter]; I think we're just letting it be," Dennehy said, adding that Beck has been given a copy of the CD. "Deconstructing Beck is partly inspired by the fact that Beck uses lots of samples. Of course, since he has the resources of a major label, he can afford to clear them," Farnsworth, 28, said. "So in a way, this says that if you're an artist with major-label resources, you have a larger scope of materials that you can use -- and personally, I think, art suffers when only those with unlimited resources can make a certain type of art." The idea, according to the student, was to use samples of Beck as a protest against record companies and copyright holders, which Farnsworth said have too much control of the distribution of art. The student runs the small indie label Illegal Art, which is currently distributing Deconstructing Beck via mail order. The activist added that the label, which is currently working on an album of samples from film soundtracks, Celluloid, does not usually target public figures whose work he likes. "Beck is very good indeed, and that's a departure for us, but his lucrative persona is a product like anything else. And we feel it could bear some subverting. We hope he agrees." Beck -- who has gained critical acclaim for his merging of original material and samples to create hits such as "Where It's At" and "The New Pollution" (RealAudio excerpt), which in their own ways are statements on pop culture -- might himself think that some of the songs on the album bear some merit. Rather than songs, the tracks on Deconstructing Beck are actually abstract, experimental sound collages void of structure or melody. Sounds suddenly appear, fly around in circles, speed up, slow down, explode, whisper and then leave as quickly as they appear. The lack of coherence gives the album an ethereal quality that makes each piece difficult to remember or even hum. Some tracks focus on playing with the beat such as "Killer Control Enters Blackhole" (RealAudio excerpt), whose composer is listed as Huk Don Phun, while others offer unexpected jolts of noise such as in "Paving the Road to Hell, Part 2." "Stuck Together, Falling Apart," by Steev Hise, takes its samples from a variety of Beck's albums, including Stereopathic Soulmanure, Mellow Gold, Odelay! and even a B-side to Loser. In his resulting collage, Farnsworth rips the sounds apart, joining lyrics of different songs to create new phrases, looping them and then piling them on top of each other. The effect is like turning five radio dials at once and finding Beck on every station while someone fast-forwards a CD in the background. Taking a totally different tack, the lush "Doublefolded" (RealAudio excerpt) by Hromlegn Kainn tries its hand at the "folding audio" experiments of Plunderphonics pioneer John Oswald, a process in which sounds are duplicated and then layered upon themselves dozens or hundreds of times. The result, in this case, is a track that alternates between clattering song snippets and beautiful drone music cascading over a snare-drum beat. "We don't have any official statement from this end right now," said Brian McPherson of the Los Angeles-based law firm Rosenfeld, Meyer & Susman, which represents Beck. Upon first hearing of the album, McPherson sent a warning to ®™ark, the secretive collective of about a dozen anti-corporate activists that funded the project. ®™ark is the same group that funded the notorious Barbie Liberation Organization, which switched the voice boxes of thousands of Barbie and G.I. Joe dolls, resulting in the famous blonde toy gutturally averring, "Dead men tell no tales." ®™ark was also behind the embarrassing 1996 release of SimCopter by Maxis; a company insider was paid to program hidden images of men in swimsuits kissing each other into the game. Despite these early threats, Illegal Art has no intention of backing down by paying Beck or DGC, and it would receive financial backing from ®™ark should the project end up in court, according to an anonymous ®™ark representative. "First we would try to coordinate pro bono help. We've found such resources in the past and could likely do so again," the source said. Definitions of fair use have been a sore point in the past between independent artists and large corporate entities -- Plunderphonics' Oswald used unauthorized Michael Jackson samples to poke fun at the artist in 1989, and he had to destroy hundreds of copies of the work as a result. More recently, in 1992, Negativland, a San Francisco-based art-rock group, created "U2," a three song EP that included obscene radio-show outtakes of DJ Casey Kasem played over a Muzak-like rendition of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." Although U2 purportedly didn't mind the song, lawyers for U2's label, Island Records, sued SST Records, forcing the indie label to pull the CD from record stores. Negativland documented the case in their book, "The Story Of The Letter U and the Numeral 2. (For more on Negativland, see the September 1997 Addicted To Noise cover story package.) A total of 10,000 copies of the Deconstructing Beck disc, which features no cover art, were manufactured at a cost of $5,000, Farnsworth said, adding, "We really won't be able to unload that many." Illegal Art is selling the disc for $5 solely by mail order at its website (http://www.detritus.net/illegalart/beck). Adam Wisniewski, a New Yorker who got hooked on Beck in 1992 after buying a tape of the artist's homemade demos in a Los Angeles record store, had mixed feelings about Deconstructing Beck: "Certainly, it's fitting for an artist who makes a career and hit singles out of samples to be sampled himself and messed with," he said. "But at the same time, artistically, the genre of 'cut and paste' has its moments ... and generally they're only about 10 seconds long." Despite what fans think, Illegal Art's Farnsworth said he released the album with the belief that Beck would support the concept, if not the material. "We're hoping that we'll be able to get some sort of feedback from him. We're trying to get him to be on our side since the lawyers probably don't care about the music but maybe Beck might." [Sat., March 7, 1998, 9 a.m. PST] |
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