Banned Musics

mrG — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 22:27:30 -0500

It's bold and encouraging to see sites like BannedMusic.org stepping up and sticking their necks out for the Double Black and Grey, and I wonder if it's worth mentioning, and if they'd be as eager to defend my own youthful artistic foray into sampling sans permissions silently illicitly online all these years cowered in the back pages of the web behind a mask of lo fidelity ...

Subterranean Homesick Blues -- words by Bob Dylan, music, recording and arrangement by mrG
That stradivarius solo is played by someone I forget but I think it was sampled from either Norma Beecroft or Ann Southam or some other Canadian New Music Composers disc, recorded on a Sony cassette deck using multiple Sony 2-track reel-to-reels, the guitar riff is reversed, misc soundbyte interstitial cuts come from a Palm Sunday cut-up tape I composed by randomly pre-sequenced sampling of station changes and alternate breath clips from my FM radio. Recorded in my living room in Toronto, circa 1979.

There. It's out now. Come clean. Confess'd --- and it's funny now, looking back at my decades of self-imposed censorship: I can't believe I actually feared being sued by the likes of Norma Beecroft for soundbyte theft! A scant quarter century on and along comes DJ Danger Mouse to take on EMI, and he lives to tell the tale. Times change.

One of these days I'll have to dig out and re-mix the old Great Nature Theatre tapes, digitally scrub them up for re-distribution; loads of sampling fun, tape gymnastics and abused furniture ...

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Banned Musics