I was away most of the weekend and was saddened to hear of the death of Don Joyce of Negativland. As a foremost practitioner of the cut up and a campaigner for the right to sample he was one of the pioneers. I never met him but Negativland were and are one of the bedrocks of the cut up/collage/sampling genre from their records to their Over The Edge radio shows. Here’s ‘Yellow, Black & Rectangular’ from ‘Escape From Noise’.
Their ‘Helter Stupid / The Perfect Cut’ is one of my favourite cut up records and their backing of releases like Jon Oswald‘s Plunderphonics anthology is admirable. Walking past a shelf of ephemera we have in the house today I spied this little set of badges nestled amongst them, half hidden, probably included free with a bunch of cassettes that I ordered from their website back in the midst of time. RIP Don.
Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us knew Don well and dedicated a radio show to him just last week and you can read Negativland’s heartfelt statement after his death on the KPFA radio station blog, home of Over The Edge.
Well, yes there is that aspect of it but I take issue with absolutely free material, it’s nice in theory but only works so far in practice.
That’s grand, I assumed there’d be a liberal general attitude to web reuse. Just seemed especially pertinent with the CVS badges – I can only find one other shot of them online, and it’s tiny.
Of course if I was really entering into the CVS spirit I wouldn’t even be asking. I’d be drummed out of the union!
It’s on the web so It’ll get used whether I like it or not, I just put a djfood.org watermark on my photos in the hope that, in decades to come, when these images are awash in the sea of media without a link back to the original, people will hopefully know who as least took the photo and maybe come back to this portal for more. If I put something up I expect it to get reblogged, shared, stripped of its original context etc. etc. – as long as you credit the source then re-use away. If you want to make money out of it then we need to talk about a share too but that’s another story.
RIP Don. Love the badge set – any chance you could put an explicit CC / Copyleft / PD licence on your pack photo for reuse?
The (or at least *a*) CVS website still exists at http://cvs.detritus.net/ – the bulletin PDF there remains excellent reading, and there are links to some core plunderphonics tracks.