This Is A Sampling Sport...

Copyright Criminals from IndiePix on Vimeo.

It's rather fitting that I'm writing this on Record Store Day. Anybody that really knows Will and I know that we are students of the sound collage, the audio cut-up. A good part of our friendship in its early stages was based around taking bits and pieces from different records, cassettes, CDs, television shows and commercials, and mixing all of that up to create something fun and amusing, even if it was only funny to us. I liked to refer to it as "blackdada", an absurdist audio take on being Black in America. However, as Will once accurately stated through his Ozzark & Company comic strip, "You can never take Blackness too seriously."

The above trailer is from a documentary called Copyright Criminals, which is all about sampling culture and features a number of great artists in hip-hop, soul, funk, and rock music. It was part of the Independent Lens series on PBS and it's also available to watch through Netflix and Hulu. My man Fitz recently tipped me off to an online mixtape put together by one of my cut-up heroes, the great Steve Stein a.k.a. Steinski. His latest Rough Mix includes music discussed in the new book Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling. It also incorporates bits of commentary from Copyright Criminals weaved through this amazing connect-the-dots hodgepodge of songs from the likes of James Brown, De La Soul, Public Enemy, Steely Dan, Marley Marl, Jungle Brothers, A Tribe Called Quest, Parliament-Funkadelic, and a bunch of other sample origins that are escaping me right now. It's incredible. It celebrates the art of sampling and music making as a whole and the mix is ABSOLUTELY FREE for the taking.

You can find the mix for free download right here. Consider this the official jump start to your weekend. Enjoy...