classroom to cackalack

dj dr.C pon the lecture-demo

DJ C gave a rockin' presentation to my electro class last week, showing us the innards of his gregory isaacs refix and putting down a knob-twistin' mini-mix.



this week dr.C and i will be travelling together down to north cackalacky - no offense - to represent some of our boston-baked bouncement. we'll be playing tomorrow night (thursday, march 23) at the local 506 in chapel hill, joining our hosts, one duran and dj yugen of the 1200 problems crew.

also, in more of an academic mode, dj C and i will be discussing music and copyright issues at an ibiblio gathering taking place friday at 3pm at UNC in the "freedom forum" (the school of journalism and mass communications, carroll hall). given the latest stirrings in the great copyright wars, i'm sure our talk will be au courant.

[btw, never fear: diddy's on the appeal. and who will win in this battle of millionaires wrestling over the rights to other people's music? who knows. who's at the bottom of all this? who else: bridgeport music, a collective of composers, musicians, and producers lawyers, accountants, and investors who've been steadily sueing the pants off sample-based producers (or, more precisely, their labels) for years.]

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and while i've got something of a class-related post going, allow me to point you to some outstanding student contributions to date.

in a nice piece of music(al) criticism, one member of the class took stockhausen's race-baiting diss of the "technocrats" and remixed his avant-grumbling into a robotic MC riding some "post-african" rhythms. check it out:

oliver day, "F U Stockhausen"

another enterprising producer got ambitious with his dancehall "production project" and put together an online collaboration with a brooklyn-located dancehall DJ (who shouts out "harvard university"!) and an omaha-based digital-hardcore rocker. the track brings together all sorts of stylistic strands, from reggae to punk to jungle:

lunatik (ft. lynx & joe of the jungle), "gangsta war"

yet another impressive production is sir kibbles's trancey reworking of the chicago house classic, "move your body," complete with speak'n'spell vocals and all the little melodic bits that make marshall jefferson's original so technotronically compelling:

sir kibbles, "move your body (remix)"

there are many others worth mentioning, and i don't mean to give anyone short shrift here. i've been really enjoying the projects people have been cooking up. the main point of these exercises is to get a better, hands-on sense of how a particular style comes together. since that may sound a little dry, it's great that students consistently go beyond the call of duty and come up with tracks that not only engage with the genre(s) in question but that stand on their own as wonderful little pieces of music. if you want to check out more, just skim through the "listening journal" entries at our class blog, many of which, especially in recent weeks, have focused on these production projects.

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finally, i'd like to point people to a few youtube videos recently posted by yet another member of the class. these were taken at the sonic acts festival curated by señor /rupture. some great short vids of jason forrest and hrvatski dancing in front of their laptops and aaron spectre flexing his MIDI muscles (see below).