Futuresonic 2006

Dear Eileen and Ben,

Good to meet you at your event the other day!

It is great to see a project like Open Music Archive happening in Manchester, and I thought the live element was really well done.

The Futuresonic festival is coming round again, scheduled for 20-23 July. Alongside the music gigs we stage a lot of media art exhibitions and workshops, and much of that world revolves around open source, grass-roots, collaborative culture.

As it is our 10th year we have decided to take Collaborative Cultures as the main festival theme - so there is a lot of overlap with your project!

Our funds are as ever limited, so not in a position to propose a commission as such right now. But if we could find a way to involve Open Music Archive in the festival I would be very keen to explore.

Drew

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14th April 2006

Dear Drew,

It was great to finally meet up and talk in Manchester at our event. We’d love to participate in Futuresonic 2006 and we’re enthusiastic about contributing to the festival’s theme of collaborative cultures.

As you know, our project Open Music Archive is a collaborative initiative to source, digitise and distribute out-of-copyright sound recordings. We are independent artists and see our project as a response to the closing down of creativity that is imposed by copyright.

It was always our intention for the Open Music Archive to provide a resource of recordings to be shared and sampled in a space outside of a royalty-generating economy. As we discussed at the event we were thinking about this idea of making a vinyl tool: a 12 inch record featuring material generated from the archive (rare original recordings, new remix tracks, short vocal snippets, percussive noises, sounds, samples, breaks and beats) to be used/performed in some way at the festival. All the material would be in the public domain or copyleft licensed.

At the moment we’re researching scratch tools, breaks compilations and battle records: Q-Bert - Breaktionary (Dirtstyles) DJ Swamp - Never Ending Drum & Bass Loops (Decadent) Five Deez - Table Noise Vol 3 (Traffic)

We’re also looking at compilations like Strictly Breaks and the short tracks of J Dilla AKA Jay Dee - Donuts (Stones Throw)

Obviously, all records are potentially material for new creative work – battle records however are tools explicitly designed to enable new production. In contrast to our approach - the breaks, beats and samples collected on battle records are created from tracks that are not officially licensed [1].

We’re keen to explore this idea of a vinyl tool here on the wiki – let us know what you think.

Eileen and Ben