Excellent History of Hip-Hop Cartoon

A great and pretty accurate cartoon by Ed Piskor detailing the birth of hip-hop can be found here at Boing Boing published in weekly installments.

DJ Spooky on copyright law: Open Source, Open Culture

Big Think
....

Question: Should digital content be free?

DJ Spooky: I’m a big pro-open source, pro-creative commons kind of artist. I think that it’s important to realize that copyright law as it is written relates mainly to the 18th century’s relationship to physical goods. And as things move more and more to a digital media, hyper-connected world we need to transform the models of how we think of ownership. Copyright law is something I respect, but the way the law is written versus the way we live in this rip, mix, burn kind of scenario, you know... It’s all about I think thinking of digital music as the kind of new folk culture where everyone should share, and by sharing they create a more rich and robust, you know, narrative.
......

Check out the interview on video HERE.

Mr. Fingers "Can You Feel It" (Martin Luther King remix)

When Larry Heard (aka Mr. Fingers) put out "Can You Feel It" in 1986 it was very popular and influential in house music circuits. I can only imagine what it would have felt like to be on the floor of the Warehouse when this 1988 remix hit, using Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc.

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. from Chris Cairns on Vimeo.

New Danger Mouse album to be released as a blank CD-R

YAHOO

The Tech Blog

New Danger Mouse album to be released as CD-R -- blank CD-R

Mon May 18, 2009 11:36AM EDT

Nowhere in the world will you find more creativity than that of musicians who are taking old music, mixing it together, and coming up with something new. Danger Mouse took the mash-up mainstream with his watershed The Grey Album, the audacious 2004 blend of The Beatles' The White Album and Jay-Z's The Black Album, and since then the man has exploded into superstardom.

The problem of course is that The Grey Album was totally illegal, and record label EMI (which owns the rights to The White Album) went to outrageous lengths to prevent its distribution. Those efforts failed, and the bootleg was copied far and wide and eventually earned it serious mainstream coverage (even lowest-common-denominator media rag Entertainment Weekly reviewed the album, giving it an A), despite the shaky legal footing the album sat on.

Now, Danger Mouse -- after hitting the mainstream with his Gnarls Barkley act, among other projects -- is back with a new album, one which is set to be just as controversial. Citing his ongoing feud with EMI over the prior album, Danger Mouse's new Dark Night of the Soul will be released and sold exclusively as -- get this -- a blank CD-R. It will be up to the buyer to find the music through other means and burn it onto the CD.

Per a statement from the Mouse:

Danger Mouse's new project Dark Night Of The Soul consists of an album length piece of music by Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse and a host of guest vocalists, along with a collection of original David Lynch photography inspired by and based on the music. The photographs, which provide a visual narrative for the music, are compiled in a limited edition, hand numbered 100+ page book which will now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'

Now I'm not entirely clear what this album has to do with EMI specifically -- does it borrow from new EMI tracks or is this just about the old Grey Album kerfuffle? -- but regardless the idea is pretty spectacular. Fans get what sounds like a really impressive piece of art and are supporting the artists financially by purchasing the album, but since there's nothing infringing on the album, the record industry can't legally prevent its sale. I have visions of EMI executives with steam billowing out of their ears over this one.

And don't forget: You can always copy it to audio tape!

What is your sampling epiphany? (Massive Attack samples)

UK Guardian Music Blog

Check out the original post HERE for lots of embedded hyperlinks and media examples of the samples discussed.

What is your sampling epiphany?

An unofficial compilation of tracks sampled by Massive Attack showcases the group's aesthetic through the songs that informed it – and provides fans with the thrill of discovering the originals

Posted by Simon Reynolds Thursday 26 February 2009 16.43 GMT guardian.co.uk

Sampling is weird. We're so used to it, it's been such a commonplace part of pop music for so long (since the late 1980s), that it's easy to lose sight of what a peculiar thing it is. Although sampling is often compared with collage, I think there's a profound difference which relates to the added dimension of time that music inhabits. With recorded music, however much it's doctored and enhanced through studio techniques (multitracking, overdubs etc), there generally remains a kernel of life inside it; what you are hearing is a sequence of human actions happening in real-time. (I'm talking about played music here, as opposed to programmed music. But it is overwhelmingly the case that played music is what gets sampled – music of the 70s particularly, when analogue recording quality was at its peak but drum machines and sequencers had yet to replace tight rhythm sections.) To take a chunk of living time – which is what a sample is – and chain it into a loop isn't just appropriation, it's a form of enslavement. But to pluck several different segments of live playing from separate space-time contexts and force them into unholy congress with each other … that's sorcery.

When sampling first made waves in the mid-80s, most journalistic discussions focused on the legal aspect, typically framing the samplers in punk-like terms as renegade, naughty, larcenous, irreverent. Likewise, academic studies of sampling in pop over the ensuing decades have largely concerned themselves with copyright and corporate power, typically siding with "the streets" versus the entertainment-media complex. These are perennially interesting issues, for sure, especially when given a postcolonial inflection: not just pirating and bootlegging, but the fact that non-western or pre-capitalist folk cultures typically have much looser, more collective notions of authorship and originality. (A friend of mine who's both a DJ and a law student is currently doing dissertation research in Jamaica looking at the "fluid" – a euphemism – notion of copyright in dancehall culture.) None the less, there appears to other crucial dimensions to sampling – its aesthetics and its philosophical implications – that are relatively neglected. (I could be wrong here, of course, and if you know of really penetrating and provocative work in this area, please point me in its direction!)

What got me thinking about all this was the arrival several weeks ago of an advance CD called Protected: Massive Samples. It's the second in a series started by Rapster Records compiling the original tracks that a well-known group has sampled, in this case Massive Attack. The first volume, released a year ago, was Discovered: A Collection of Daft Funk Samples, which showcased raw material for all those hot hits by Daft Punk. These compilations have not been done as a collaboration with, or even with the blessing of, the group in question; the titles and packaging take great care not to use either band's full name at any point, presumably for legal reasons. And I wonder if Daft Punk or Massive Attack are happy about having their sources so clearly signposted.

The sample-source album isn't a brand new idea. When Kanye West was first blowing up circa The College Drop-out, I recall a vinyl bootleg LP in circulation that collated the tunes he'd sampled, such as Chaka Khan's Through the Fire – the basis for his Through the Wire (although "virtual entirety of" would be nearer the mark, give or take the drums and West's rhymes). I expect there have been other such unofficial compilations. I didn't buy the Kanye Samples record because I was reluctant to interfere with my enjoyment of his album. Similarly I was slightly nervous about playing Protected: Massive Samples the first time. Would I ever be able to listen to Blue Lines the same way again? Would knowing the extent of Massive's debts diminish my admiration, sabotage my sense of awe at their achievement?

This dilemma is unique to pop music of the post-sampling era. There's no counterpart in other artforms that I can think of. It's not like looking at the sketches for a painting, or the rushes for a movie, or even like seeing the original movie from which remake is based. It's sort of like a scenario where you venerate a particular painting and then get presented with tubes of the specific colors of oil paint the artist used on that work. Except not really, because the groove of Billy Cobham's Stratus simply is – in a direct and exact and supremely concrete way – the groove of Massive's Safe from Harm. So we're back to that idea of the sample as a living thing, a portion of time and energy wrested away from its original owners and put to service. Idea for a feature: track down the players on that Cobham session and find out what they really think and feel about being used in this manner. I assume Cobham, as composer of the tune, has at least been remunerated (he gets a credit on Safe from Harm) but quite possibly not the other players (Jan Hammer, Lee Sklar, Tommy Bolin). It's not just about the money, though, it's about having one's performance taken out of its context, severed from its original artistic intent. For what is interesting about comparing Stratus with Safe from Harm is how much all the stuff that clearly mattered to Cobham and crew (the noodly, improvised jazziness – there's a long abstract intro, for instance) gets jettisoned as Massive Attack, being typical B-boys, focus on the driving bass-and-drums groove. Indeed, they focus on the most linear, straightforward segment of the rhythm track, which gets looser and wilder at other points in the song.

I'd heard Stratus before and immediately spotted the Massive connection, so its appearance on Protected didn't surprise me. But I was slightly startled by how extensively Daydreaming – another killer tune from Blue Lines – is based on Mambo by Wally Badarou, a session keyboardist associated with Island Records's Compass Point studios in Nassau, who came to moderate renown in the 80s through his work with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Grace Jones, Black Uhuru and others. Indeed, it makes me want to hunt down Badarou's solo albums to see what other gems are secreted there.

The overall effect of Protected: Massive Samples is less "gotcha" sample-spotting, though, and more like listening to one of those Back to Mine albums: it's a delectably consistent and mood-unified collection of plushly produced, mostly downtempo soul and reggae. Lowrell's Mellow Mellow – the gorgeous source for Blue Lines's Lately – defines the vibe precisely. Getting stoned to these tunes – as you can be sure the Massive boys did on many a Bristol afternoon in the 80s – must have been like lolling around on a gigantic sofa made of marshmallow. Protected also resembles the Under the Influence series: like a photographic negative of a Best Of compilation, it showcases the group's aesthetic through the listening that informed it.

Some self-consciously arty or iconoclastic exponents of sampling recall the appropriation artists of late 70s New York, figures like Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman, whose work involved gambits like copying famous pictures and appending your own signature, or rephotographing photographs (sometimes famous shots, sometimes iconic adverts) and then cropping or otherwise reframing them. That seems quite close to what the early Justified Ancients of Mu Mu did, or avant-pranksters like Plunderphonics and Negativland, where the whole point is sampling a group or song that is universally known and freighted with associations.

But the approach of Massive Attack, Daft Punk and their peers was not based on exploiting familiarity; only the real cratedigging headz ever knew the sources they were drawing on. If the Rapster series continues there's no shortage of potential candidates for this treatment: DJ Shadow, RZA, Chemical Brothers, J Dilla. Most likely the crate-diggers types have got there first and already pulled together unofficial sample-spotting compilations for these artists, and many others besides, for circulation on the web. Similarly, there's a whole site dedicated to identifying samples used in jungle, but for the moment it contents itself with simply citing the source, as opposed to offering MP3s or embedded YouTube audio streams.

Talking of jungle, I'm reminded of how sampling has created a unique and unprecedented form of pop rapture: the epiphany of suddenly, accidentally encountering the source track for a favourite tune. This happens all the time if you are a fan of jungle and hardcore rave. I vividly remember the thrill that ambushed me during a James Bond movie when suddenly I heard a portentous orchestral theme that I'd loved for years as a key element of Acen's 1992 rave classic Trip to the Moon. (The source in question: John Barry's Space March, from his score for You Only Live Twice, soundtracking the moment when a Soviet capsule in orbit is swallowed up by a mysterious shark-like spacecraft).

But probably my all-time favourite sample epiphany relates to a mystery tune, also from 1992, by an artist who trafficked under the period-evocative moniker E. I taped this track off a pirate radio show and have no idea if it ever saw proper release or what its title is. But it's a real lost classic, propelled by the most boombastic breakbeat loop and featuring a comic little vocal hook that coarsely roars "Oi!!!! I've got a little black disc wiv me tune on it!". But there's also an incongruously plangent guitar part and a slow fade where the groove drops away leaving just an aching guitar solo and a totally blissed raver gasping "I... I... I … luvvit!!!". Several years ago, idly channel surfing, I landed midway through The Wall and realised with a shock of delight that the lead guitar on E's tune was actually David Gilmour. But it was only a few months back, once again chancing upon Alan Parker's overripe farrago, that I realised the whole "little black disc" bit was a parody of Nobody Home, specifically the bit that goes "Oi! I've got a little black book with me poems in!"

The French philosopher Paul Virilio argued that every new technology comes complete with its own unique catastrophe; the invention of the aeroplane, for instance, was also the invention of the plane crash. The corollary of the sample epiphany is what I call the "sample stain". But that's a subject I'll return to in a future blogpost.

Grandmaster Flash Interview regarding his New Recording

LAT

From the Los Angeles Times
THE SUNDAY CONVERSATION
Things are just grand
By Choire Sicha

March 1, 2009

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five formed in New York in the late '70s and radically altered the musical and cultural landscape -- pioneering the turntable as a way to make music, not just play it. After being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007, Flash, 51, is preparing to release his first studio album in more than 20 years. "The Bridge" is out Tuesday.

How was your weekend?

I was with my kiddies, 'cuz I'm leaving for Australia for a few weeks, so I did the dad thing. I worked the club called Eden, which I love to do when I'm in [New York], on 47th Street and 8th Avenue. And when I get off the phone, I have to make a mad dash for my suitcase.

When did it first happen that your kids were listening to some music and you were like, what is this noise?

Actually I'm the creator of the noise, so it was never noise to me! They were like, "Dad, what is that you doing?" As opposed to the other way around. The things I've developed that've become the worldwide way DJs play, my kids, they get it.

Do they ever turn you on to stuff?

My 18-year-old, I never forget, this goes back, like, five years. There was this artist who used to make these mixtapes, he used to try to get me to listen to this guy. He said he was the greatest MC of all time. Of course I had to fight with him -- there's a lot of great MCs! His name happened to be Lil Wayne. I was like, "OK, this guy's pretty good." Today he looks at me and he's like, "Dad, I told you."

What's on your heavy repeat?

Because I want to get into remixes, production, video game music and doing scores, soundtracks, this guy by the name of Stravinsky, the song is called "The Rite of Spring." This guy! In one song he'll go from a happy situation to a real dark situation, how he changes the chord structure in one song -- it's just kind of amazing. So Stravinsky, that's what I'm into right now.

Oh, you're going way back.

And I'm going to be listening to Brahms, Tchaikovsky -- maybe something might materialize out of this! Don't quote me, but anything's possible.

Have you done your first film score yet?

Actually, I figure by this year I'll have a couple things. I have a video-game music deal, but I can't say what it is yet. But it'll be the biggest video game of the year next year. But I love the idea of going into a recording studio and experimenting with sounds. Where I come from, which is '70s, '80s, you would have anywhere from five, 10, 12 keyboards in one room. Now they have these things called plug-ins, which you can get the digital version of that same keyboard. You just install it into a Mac hard drive. I've got almost every great keyboard in my recording studio. The mixing, matching, trying different things -- like I was doing with this record on the production side.

Yes, your sort of intellectual world tour that is this record.

I think what I wanted to do when I made this album, "The Bridge," I wanted to make this in the mind of a DJ set. When I say that, I'm an international DJ. On my musical plate, I might be in Japan, so I'll play first Billy Squier and maybe Chic second. And the third, the Incredible Bongo Band, and the fourth, I'll play "I Just Wanna Love U" by Jay-Z -- and sixth, Mary J. Blige. I call that doing hip-hop.

I had to think: How do I do hip-hop with this record? Once a track was written, I'd burn a CD, jump in the car and listen over and over again. Then I'd think, I should get Snoop on this track, and Q-Tip could play on this track and Busta Rhymes would do great on this track. Then I said to myself, "This record would be incomplete if I don't go find unsigned talent. . . ." Then I got a new urge. I said, "This record would be incomplete without international. How do I not do that?" So I had to listen to MCs from Japan and Africa and France and Sweden, Spain. Anywhere possible! That's how I was able to do these things hip-hop. This album allowed me also to do hip-hop by taking a well-known MC and pairing them up with an unknown MC.

What was the most awe-inspiring music of the last year?

Boy, there's so much! When I get offstage, I get kids that sneak backstage. Modern technology has allowed these kids to go into a computer and make a song! Never in my wildest dreams did I think the world would come to this. I hear so much.

You said it took a long time to get over the bitter taste left in your mouth from your early business dealings. How are you doing business now?

Oh, it's wonderful. First things first, to be quite honest, I was able to create a company that was mine. And I had to go back and get with my children. I put my whole life into those early years. So first things first, I had to get to know my children. Then it was a matter of being able to find staff that was willing to devote themselves to helping me to build Grandmaster Flash Enterprises. And I found five people who understand and love what I do and that back me. And also the actual distributing company, which is in Germany, I have access to their staff as well. I get all the resources I need. This record could have been a little harder to make!

So you've got it worked out.

I'm happy with the end result of the record. We'll see what happens March 3! See if it all makes sense!

MacArthur "Genius Award" Winner Walter Kitundu

He is an amazing instrument maker, composer, turntablist, and sculptor. Here is a sample of his work: the phonokora, a hybrid of a West Africa kora, a turntable, and electronics (congrats to him!):



More:

De Phazz: Jazz with a Turntable (NPR)

De Phazz: Jazz with a Turntable

Listen to the story at NPR

Weekend Edition Saturday, April 26, 2008 - The music of German DJ Pit Baumgartner — a.k.a. De Phazz — is a bit hard to categorize. Calling it "jazz with a turntable," De Phazz samples and remixes music he finds just about anywhere, from Ella Fitzgerald hits to 10 cent flea market records. The outcome is both surprising and seamless.

Baumgartner plays a hybrid of electronic dance music and jazz while touring with his band and recording albums, but most of the time he works as a remixer — most notably for the Verve Remix Series — reworking classic songs by Ella Fitzgerald, Kurtis Blow and Boy George.

Baumgartner describes himself as more of a musical collage artist than composer or instrumentalist. "It's a collage thing. I love to bring things together that normally don't fit." he explains. "My music, it joins you while you are doing something. It gives you space to not listen to it immediately or constantly. But if you listen to it constantly and deeper, you should have some little pearls to find."

The artist's latest album is Tales of Trust, a solo effort that gave Baumgartner the freedom to move beyond the live band format. He says experimenting with the song dictates how it will turn out. "At a certain point the song gives you the direction. The song tells you 'listen I need a trumpet' or 'I don't need nothing, I'm an instrumental song' and then it goes by itself."

It's those combinations that Baumgartner finds most interesting. He says, "I don't think that somebody really invents new music. I don't think that's possible. There's so much music — in the train, the supermarket and the airport. I can't really tell you, 'Am I composing this or did I hear this just two days before somewhere?'"

Copyright Criminals: This Is a Sampling Sport

Great video (labeled a work in progress) with artists and scholars discussing audio sampling. Saw it first on Audio Lemon via Copyright Criminals.

The Science of Corporate DJs

LA Times
SMALL BUSINESS
The science of corporate DJs
Prescriptive Music sets the the desired tone at restaurants and hotels.
By Kimi Yoshino , Times Staff Writer
Times Staff Writer

July 18, 2007

Allen Klevens and Jason Shapiro don't spin vinyl at parties or nightclubs, but they might just be the ultimate DJs.

If you've checked into a Marriott recently, eaten at Wolfgang Puck's Cut or gotten a facial at Spa Nordstrom, you've probably heard their mixes.

It's a science, said Klevens, a former musician who started his Woodland Hills-based Prescriptive Music business by compiling and peddling soothing CDs for surgeons to play in operating rooms.

Today, Klevens and Shapiro help hotels and restaurants create a vibe. Don't think it matters? Listen to the music next time you're out to dinner, or checking into a resort.

"Music sets the tone for any place — whether you're in the car, whether you're in the home or in a hotel," said Klevens, 34. "However the client wants them to feel, we can portray with music."

Too loud and it overtakes conversations. Too soft and it adds nothing. If it's the morning, it should be mellow. Think Michael Buble and Norah Jones, not the Rolling Stones or Madonna, who are better suited for the afternoon.

"You notice it when it's not good or you notice it when it's not there," said Klevens, sitting with Shapiro in The Blvd restaurant and lounge at the Four Seasons Beverly Wilshire. "Put it back on and it changes the whole vibe."

To make their point, they tap into their laptop wired into the hotel's sound system and turn the music off.

In an instant, the room turns loud and hectic — lots of jumbled conversation and noise. Music, they contend, can make all the difference.

Unlike Muzak, in which playlists cannot be altered on site at a moment's notice, Prescriptive Music offers clients a licensed on-demand music system, which allows them to hear what they want, wherever and whenever they want. They also can manipulate playlists to delete songs or play them at a specific time.

A pianist since age 4, Klevens said music is "in my blood." But after graduating from UNLV with a degree in music and communications, he didn't have a plan for how to turn it into a career.

For a while, he sold pianos and television advertising time. Neither made him happy. One day, bored, he went with his dad to a convention in Anaheim for the American Assn. of Operating Room Nurses.

One booth had people lined up to buy a CD, "Music for the O.R.," and the idea hit him.

He formed Prescriptive Music in 1999, with the slogan: "Bringing music to health." He compiled six CDs, finding musicians to create and record music suitable for doctors. One album was a mix of piano and cello music. Cellos are the closest instrument to the human voice and relaxing in tone, Klevens said.

At a trade show, he met someone who introduced him to the Venetian hotel's Canyon Ranch SpaClub.

The Las Vegas spa wanted a new CD and new packaging. It became Klevens' first private-label CD, tailored specifically for the destination.

The Venetian began leaving the CD on pillows in some of its suites. Pretty soon, other spas and hotels started calling Prescriptive to do the same thing for them.

Klevens and Shapiro sift through Internet sites such as MySpace and Facebook for emerging artists, and they sign musicians from other countries. Often, customers don't want recognizable songs. They want music that sets a tone and reinforces the message of the place.

One mountain spa in Utah, for example, asked for yodeling music. "I tell you, we scoured everywhere and we found it," Klevens said.

Klevens struck up a friendship with Shapiro through their children and in 2005, they teamed up. Shapiro, a former baseball player for the Chicago White Sox farm system and a real estate lender, helped focus on the business side.

Sales in 2006 ballooned by nearly 300% to $1.35 million. They expect to double that in 2007. With six employees, including an art director, music director and salesperson, their team is "lean and mean," Shapiro said.

The business has branched out well beyond the branded CDs. Last September, they pioneered what they call "On Key," packaging a CD with a special slot for a hotel key. The CDs are given to guests when they check in. The Flamingo casino in Las Vegas rolled out the CDs as part of their new "Go Rooms" with flat-panel televisions, iPod docking stations and a CD and DVD player. Among their other clients are San Diego's new Ivy Hotel and the Noble House Hotel & Resorts, which has 11 properties in the U.S.

"We're pretty much redefining the Flamingo," said Jay Franken, the hotel's vice president of operations. "We opened in the '50s and we were at the top, but it's gone downhill. Now we're trying to get it back on top again."

With hotel guests, Franken said, "You only have one chance at a first impression." Customers checking into the renovated rooms are handed their key, tucked inside the CD case.

The case also contains a message from the Flamingo's president: "Settle in, unpack and enjoy the music!"

Once in their room, guests can listen to the music, which Franken describes as "down-tempo lounge music." The 15-minute CD includes three mixes and a fourth song by Nils Lofgren, the guitarist from Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.

"The guests love" the CD, Franken said. "A lot of people are taking it with them. We're not getting very many of them back. And customers are asking, 'The music's cool, can we get more?' "

Flamingo may have Klevens and Shapiro put together a full CD of 20 tracks and offer it for sale in the hotel's gift shop.

Besides the private-label and On Key CDs, Prescriptive Music offers music consulting and custom playlists. Right now, they're helping Marriott International Inc. install music systems at 400 hotels across the country.

Typically, they meet with hotel managers to find out what kind of environment they want to create, then they start building a playlist.

"It's an iPod on steroids," Klevens said. "We can access over 100,000 tracks."

As part of their consulting, Klevens and Shapiro usually tell hotels to turn up the volume. The music is also zoned into chunks of time and types of music. At the Beverly Wilshire, they've created a special jazz-meets-'80s happy hour selection for The Blvd lounge.

In the hotel's spa, the music had to be soothing, but not sleep inducing. After a brief experiment with a vocal track or two, those were ditched in favor of more instrumental tunes. The system is so personalized that spa director Daisy Tepper said the staff could create custom playlists for frequent clients.

"We had 10 CD players playing five CDs and people would say, 'I'm so sick and tired of this music,' " Tepper said. "When I found these guys, I was in heaven."

kimi.yoshino@latimes.com

Scratch Monkey Software: Live Scratch Your Voice

Be sure to read his description too:

DJ Oakenfold Plays Concert w/Boston Pops

Pioneering DJ sets sights on Hollywood

By Jason Szep2 hours, 3 minutes ago

Paul Oakenfold is famous as a DJ, but this week the pioneer of "trance" dance music assumed the unusual role of playing with a 75-piece orchestra for well-heeled, champagne-sipping classical music lovers.

By playing in one of America's oldest symphony halls with the Boston Pops, he is remixing the conventional image of a DJ -- a job that has itself morphed from obscure nightclubs to celebrity status as DJs tour the globe like rock stars, put their spin on popular music and produce original work.

In an interview with Reuters, the 43-year-old Briton said his Pops performance reflected the evolution of DJs and dovetails with his work scoring music for Hollywood films such as "The Matrix Reloaded" and "Collateral."

"I'm comfortable with an orchestra because of working in film. I'm just trying to attempt more and more," said Oakenfold, who moved from Britain to Hollywood five years ago.

"From these couple of shows we are already in talks maybe to tour something around the world and hook into local orchestras," he said. "It's a challenge for me and something that I would enjoy doing."

But playing with the Boston Pops in such an intimate setting caused him some anxiety.

"I'm so used to people dancing right here in front," he said from the stage of Boston's Symphony Hall, surrounded by CD players, a turntable, synthesizer and mixer.

"They are just going to be sitting there looking up at me, so I'm a bit worried," he said before performing.

Oakenfold, one of the most influential figures in global club culture of the past 15 years, is known for remixing songs by Madonna and U2. His audience has developed beyond nightclubs into stadiums filled with thousands -- at fees as high as $50,000 a gig.

MOODY ATMOSPHERICS

The Boston performance, touted as a world premiere by the Boston Pops, was ambitious.

Oakenfold mixed samples and pre-recorded drum tracks, "scratched" on a turntable by nudging a vinyl record back and forth against the stylus, and played a synthesizer as the orchestra performed and a drummer kept pace with an electronic drum kit and another synthesizer.

The piece, part of a nearly two-hour "EdgeFest" concert by the Pops, was written by Los Angeles composer Felix Brenner and drew loud applause.

As Oakenfold played, some of the electronically produced parts were barely audible over the orchestra, creating moody atmospherics, although one section featured thundering electric bass drums that clearly startled the audience.

"You're talking about human versus the machine," said Brenner, describing the addition of a DJ to the orchestra as a live "symphonic remix."

"We're pushing that envelope. I approached a lot of different people to do this but most were scared of the idea. But Paul said 'That sounds cool.' So we got together with it."

Oakenfold's two-day Pops performance comes as classical music is gaining popularity.

Thanks to "crossover" acts such as Josh Groban, classical was the fastest-growing musical genre in 2006, with album sales up 22.5 percent. Meanwhile, many popular genres fell, including rap which dropped 20.7 percent, and R&B, which was down 18.4 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Oakenfold, who last year toured with Madonna and remixed Justin Timberlake's single "My Love," said the music that made him famous -- house and trance -- will never be as mainstream as hip hop and other music popularized by the likes of MTV.

"You just don't have the artists and the videos, radios are not playing it," he said.

The Boston Pops, famous for light classical music, is in the third year of its "Pops on the Edge" series that has also featured singer-songwriter Aimee Mann and soulful Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket as it seeks a broader audience.

Techno Pioneer Derrick May

Village Voice
Industrial Deevolutionary
A Detroit techno pioneer returns to woo the ladies back
by Kylen Campbell
February 23rd, 2007 5:20 PM

"Techno has been branded horribly," declares Derrick May. "A lot of people have a misconception of what it is. It's been branded as music that violates the cortex, as music that says, 'Girls, stay away.' It's been branded to be this music about teenage boys on ecstasy with their shirts off with red faces. So what most people have heard is a poor example of what the music is." In truth, as May—the Detroit native who helped invent the genre along with high school friends Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson—will be the first to tell you, techno is really just high-tech soul.

Nowadays, of course, the term is used—derisively, by some—to describe any electronic dance music, but its genesis is much more specific. Initially, it was a new spin on house music (i.e., disco's revenge) that distinguished itself with self-consciously synthesized sounds: a reconfiguring of classic Motor City soul with synthesizers that presaged the technology boom, which itself hit musicians just as the auto industry lurched and stumbled. Against that backdrop of industrial devolution, Atkins, Saunderson, and May married house's sensual bounce with funk's sweaty urgency, packaging it in gritty technology that betrayed its very human makers.

As for May personally, he is a wordly evangelist of the sound, DJ'ing internationally hundreds of days a year. His original production output, defined by emotive force and sublime grooves, ceased as such in 1991. But the 20-odd tracks he wrote between 1986 and 1991—songs like "Nude Photo" and the anthemic "Strings of Life"—are a microcosm of the formulas, sounds, riffs, vamps, and grooves that define much electronic music today. The studio is still a second home to the now prolific remixer, who recently completed work on the soundtrack to the film Tekkon Konkrete, hailed as Akira's successor in anime circles. He's also served as a producer for Detroit's seven-year-old electronic music festival, while his revered label, Transmat, will soon release Transmat 20: 20 Years of Detroit Techno.

A skilled turntable master by any reckoning, May is here this weekend in conjunction with a screening of Gary Bredow's documentary High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music, a labor of love that chronicles techno's genesis via nuanced interviews and smart cultural context. It tells the tale, as May says, of "How three young black kids took on the world and, against the odds, made it happen." The minds have long since been freed; the asses continue to follow.

For more about Derrick May, check out his website (it's got a great techno groove pumping while you surf it):
http://www.derrickmay.com/

TN Company Still Making Vinyl LPs

Vinyl remains relevant at Nashville record pressing plant

By John Gerome
ASSOCIATED PRESS
via the San Diego Union Tribune

9:34 a.m. February 21, 2007

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – That dusty stack of records in your parents' basement? They're not as retro as you might think.

Many record collectors, DJs and music junkies still consider vinyl to be the gold standard of recorded music – scratches, pops and all.

That enduring appeal has helped Nashville's United Record Pressing, which cranks out 20,000 to 40,000 records a day, making it one of the largest – and last – vinyl record manufacturers in the country.

“Folks thought we had disappeared,” owner and CEO Cris Ashworth said.

Started in 1962, the plant is as much a throwback as the shiny black discs it produces. The interior is dingy, the '70s decor looks like a vintage garage sale and the air is a stale blend of ink and cigarette smoke.

Ashworth, 56, sat down for a recent interview with an ashtray and pack of Merits by his side. He hardly looked the part of dance music guru, but 60 percent of his company's records are by rap, hip-hop and R&B artists such as Justin Timberlake, Beyonce, Black Eyed Peas, Christina Aguilera, Ludacris and Krayzie Bone.

Most of the discs are 12-inch singles destined for professional DJs at radio stations and dance clubs who still use vinyl records and turntables to mix, scratch and blend music.

“The record labels use us as a marketing tool to get that new track out there,” Ashworth explained. “They'll come to me on a Monday, want it out on Wednesday and played Friday or Saturday night at a club or radio station.”

Typically, the company will press four versions of the same song: a radio and club mix, as well as an instrumental and a cappella version so DJs can mix and manipulate the sound.

Another portion of United's product goes to retail stores, where vinyl is preferred by amateur DJs, collectors and purists convinced that the sound is superior to CDs.

“Vinyl has a distinct sound,” said Doyle Davis, co-owner of Grimey's New & Preloved Music, a Nashville store where 15 percent to 20 percent of sales are vinyl. “You hear people use adjectives like 'warmer' and 'more round.'

“And there are other things beside sound quality. People know what the song titles are. It's not like, 'I like track 5.' You put the needle on and let it play through – not jump around. You have more of an intimate relationship with the music.”

Vinyl records use analog technology, whereby a physical groove is etched into the record mimicking the sound wave. CDs, on the other hand, transform sound into digital packets of information.

“No one ever doubts the quality of vinyl over any other format that's ever existed,” said George Sulmers, a Nashville-based club DJ who spins classic funk and soul discs under the name Geezus. “I understand why change happened, but I don't think there was a valid need for the change.”

The means of music delivery continues to evolve. Digital downloading has eroded CD sales. Some artists are skipping CDs entirely and releasing new music online for the casual listener and on vinyl for DJs and hardcore fans.

But vinyl still accounts for a small percentage of total music sales. Last year 858,000 LPs were sold compared with 553.4 million CDs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. While the 2006 figure was up slightly from 2005, the overall trend has been down from 1.5 million in 2000.

Ashworth believes the data is skewed, though, because a lot of vinyl is sold in mom and pop stores not reflected in the SoundScan numbers.

His company has managed to thrive by picking up business from competitors in a shrinking market. Today, he has only 13 competitors compared to several dozen before CDs took over in the '90s. Revenues hit $5 million in 2004 and grew to $7 million in 2005. Last year saw significant growth over 2005, Ashworth said.

And yet the plant remains a timepiece with its rumbling presses that jar the floor, noisy blasts of compressed air and vats of blue nickel solution used to create the master discs.

Ashworth regards it a relic of Nashville's past, every bit as important as the old RCA studio where Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers recorded, or the Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Ole Opry enjoyed its heyday.

“We want to be the last vinyl plant standing, no matter what,” he said. “There is no other plant that looks like this in the country. This is an antique.”

Indeed, it still has the furnished apartment where Motown Records executives stayed when they came down from Detroit during segregation. The apartment adjoins a party room where Wayne Newton celebrated his 16th birthday.

Most of the major labels and many of the independents contract with United. Elvis Presley's reissues are pressed here, as well as recordings by Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Rod Stewart, Alan Jackson, John Mayer and many others.

“If you look at the Hot 100 singles, we represent about 80 percent of what's on the chart,” Ashworth said.

Ashworth himself is something of an oddity. A longtime corporate executive and former chief financial officer at Nashville Gas Co., he bought this place in 1999 with no experience or knowledge of the industry. At the time, the vinyl record business seemed doomed.

“My son was very worried about whether he was going to be able to go to college,” he said with a laugh, adding, “Thank the Lord for a trusting wife.”

But Ashworth made a go of it and then some, boosting employment at United from 10 to 60 people and fulfilling his own need to create something.

“A lot of people spend their lives doing something as opposed to making something, and I wanted to make something,” he said. “I wanted something tangible in my hands at the end of the day.”

*****
Here is the link to United Record Pressing: http://www.urpressing.com/

Music Industry Battles mixtapes

February 18, 2007
Hip-Hop Outlaw (Industry Version)
By SAMANTHA M. SHAPIRO

Late in the afternoon of Jan. 16, a SWAT team from the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, backed up by officers from the Clayton County Sheriff’s Office and the local police department, along with a few drug-sniffing dogs, burst into a unmarked recording studio on a short, quiet street in an industrial neighborhood near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. The officers entered with their guns drawn; the local police chief said later that they were “prepared for the worst.” They had come to serve a warrant for the arrest of the studio’s owners on the grounds that they had violated the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, a charge often used to lock up people who make a business of selling drugs or breaking people’s arms to extort money. The officers confiscated recording equipment, cars, computers and bank statements along with more than 25,000 music CDs. Two of the three owners of the studio, Tyree Simmons, who is 28, and Donald Cannon, who is 27, were arrested and held overnight in the Fulton County jail. Eight employees, mostly interns from local colleges, were briefly detained as well.

Later that night, a reporter for the local Fox TV station, Stacey Elgin, delivered a report on the raid from the darkened street in front of the studio. She announced that the owners of the studio, known professionally as DJ Drama and DJ Don Cannon, were arrested for making “illegal CDs.” The report cut to an interview with Matthew Kilgo, an official with the Recording Industry Association of America, who was involved in the raid. The R.I.A.A., a trade and lobbying group that represents the major American record labels, works closely with the Department of Justice and local police departments to crack down on illegal downloading and music piracy, which most record-company executives see as a dire threat to their business.

Kilgo works in the R.I.A.A.’s Atlanta office, and in the weeks before the raid, the local police chief said, R.I.A.A. investigators helped the police collect evidence and conduct surveillance at the studio. Kilgo consulted with the R.I.A.A.’s national headquarters in advance of the raid, and after the raid, a team of men wearing R.I.A.A. jackets was responsible for boxing the CDs and carting them to a warehouse for examination.

If anyone involved with the raid knew that the men they had arrested were two of the most famous D.J.’s in the country, they didn’t let on while the cameras were rolling. For local law enforcement, the raid on Drama and Cannon’s studio was no different from a raid they executed in October on an Atlanta factory where a team of illegal immigrants was found making thousands of copies of popular DVDs and CDs to sell on the street. Along with the bootlegged CDs, the police found weapons and a stash of drugs in the factory. (The Fox report on the DJ Drama raid included a shot of a grave-looking police officer saying, “In this case we didn’t find drugs or weapons, but it’s not uncommon for us to find other contraband.”)

But Drama and Cannon’s studio was not a bootlegging plant; it was a place where successful new hip-hop CDs were regularly produced and distributed. Drama and Cannon are part of a well-regarded D.J. collective called the Aphilliates. Although their business almost certainly violated federal copyright law, as well as a Georgia state law that requires CDs to be labeled with the name and address of the producers, they were not simply stealing from the major labels; they were part of an alternative distribution system that the mainstream record industry uses to promote and market hip-hop artists. Drama and Cannon have in recent years been paid by the same companies that paid Kilgo to help arrest them.

The CDs made in the Aphilliates’ studio are called mixtapes — album-length compilations of 20 or so songs, often connected by a theme; they are produced and mixed by a D.J. and usually “hosted” by a rapper, well known or up-and-coming, who peppers the disc with short boasts, shout-outs or promotions for an upcoming album. Some mixtapes are part of an ongoing series — in the last few years, the Aphilliates have produced 16 numbered installments of “Gangsta Grillz,” an award-winning series that focuses on Southern hip-hop; others represent a one-time deal, a quick way for a rapper to respond to an insult or to remind fans he exists between album releases. The CDs are packaged in thin plastic jewel cases with low-quality covers and are sold at flea markets and independent record stores and through online clearinghouses like mixtapekingz.com. A mixtape can consist of remixes of hit songs — for instance, the Aphilliates offered a CD of classic Michael Jackson songs doctored by a Detroit D.J. Or it can feature a rapper “freestyling,” or improvising raps, over the beat from another artist’s song; so, on one mixtape, LL Cool J’s “Love You Better” became 50 Cent’s “After My Cheddar.” In most cases, the D.J. modifies the original song without acquiring the rights to it, and if he wants to throw in a sample of Ray Charles singing or a line from a Bugs Bunny cartoon, he doesn’t worry about copyright. The language on mixtapes is raw and uncensored; rappers sometimes devote a whole CD to insulting another rapper by name. Mixtapes also feature unreleased songs, often “leaked” to the D.J. by a record label that wants to test an artist’s popularity or build hype for a coming album release. Record labels regularly hire mixtape D.J.’s to produce CDs featuring a specific artist. In many cases, these arrangements are conducted with a wink and a nod rather than with a contract; the label doesn’t officially grant the D.J. the right to distribute the artist’s songs or formally allow the artist to record work outside of his contract.

In December, not long before the bust, I spent a week with DJ Drama and the Aphilliates in Atlanta. The D.J.’s are true celebrities in the city’s vibrant hip-hop community. They were seated at the V.I.P. tables at nightclubs and parties and surrounded by fans at strip clubs, which in Atlanta are considered crucial venues for new hip-hop; tracks are often given their first spins while strippers frantically shake their behinds.

Although the music that the Aphilliates promote glorifies violence and drug dealing — one of their trademark Gangsta Grillz sound effects is a few shots fired by a gun with a silencer, followed by the thud of a body dropping — they did not live a gangster lifestyle. (Drama often rose at 8 a.m. to take his oldest daughter to kindergarten at a private school.) Instead, they seemed to be aspiring young music executives with a long-term business plan who had figured out a faster and more lucrative way to make it big than an internship at a record label.

The success of “Gangsta Grillz” had secured for the Aphilliates their own radio shows and record contracts, as well as endorsement deals with Pepsi and clothing companies. When I visited, the Aphilliates were working on an “official” Gangsta Grillz release, to be distributed by Grand Hustle, part of Atlantic Records; Drama said it would use only licensed songs and cleared samples. In September, the Aphilliates signed a partnership deal with Asylum Records, part of Warner Music Group, to distribute albums that Drama and Cannon would produce.

DJ Drama knew that aspects of his business were in what he described to me as “a legal gray area,” and he was secretive about even the most basic facts of how the Aphilliates ran their business. He allowed that he had “got rich” because of his reputation as a mixtape D.J., though he would not even admit to me that he actually sold mixtapes. The line between self-promotion and secrecy was sometimes an awkward one for him to walk, especially as his underground CDs moved further into the mainstream. Several small distributors had begun selling Drama’s CDs, repackaged with scannable barcodes, to major retailers like Best Buy.

One of the CDs confiscated by R.I.A.A. investigators during the Atlanta raid was “Dedication 2,” a mixtape that DJ Drama made with Lil Wayne, a New Orleans rapper; it appeared on the Billboard hip-hop and R&B charts and was widely reviewed in the mainstream press. (Kelefa Sanneh of The New York Times chose “Dedication 2” as one of the 10 best recordings of 2006.) As the R.I.A.A. agents boxed up Drama’s stash of “Dedication 2,” the CD continued to sell well at major retailers like Best Buy and FYE (a national chain of record stores) and also at the iTunes Store online.

The local Fox report of the bust was posted on the Internet and widely viewed. The spectacle of men who were known to every hip-hop fan as players in the mainstream music industry being arrested with the aid of the enforcement arm of that same industry was so bizarre and unexpected that a handful of conspiracy theories quickly arose to explain what had happened. Some fans speculated on message boards that the D.J.’s must have been running other illegal businesses on the side. There were others who thought that the bust was payback from a small distributor who had recently sued DJ Drama for violating a contract. But most fans simply thought the men were victims of a music industry that didn’t understand hip-hop. The day after Drama’s arrest, fans circulated on the Internet a stylized image of Drama’s face over a caption that said “Free Drama and Cannon.” Mixunit.com, the biggest Web distributor of mixtapes, removed its entire stock from the site and posted pictures of Drama and Cannon on its main page with the message, “Free the D.J.’s.” A member of the Diplomats, a Harlem hip-hop group, told MTV News that Jan. 16 was “D-day in hip-hop.” Some fans said that in protest they’d never buy another label release; a New York City radio D.J. called record labels the ultimate “snitches.”

Lil Wayne, who made “Dedication 2” with Drama, said in an interview that Drama would have to “play the game fair,” adding that he thought it was unfortunate that sometimes mixtapes outsell an artist’s official label releases, cutting into the artist’s royalties. Soon after, Rapmullet.com, one of the most prominent mixtape Web sites, posted an image of Wayne on its home page over the words: “Is Wayne a traitor? Did he side with the suits? We didn’t abandon Drama — will you? Who’s next to jump ship?”

Drama is the public face of the Aphilliates, but he, Cannon and their third partner, DJ Sense (a k a Brandon Douglas, 26) function as a team; all three are the hosts of a weekly radio show broadcast on WHTA, an Atlanta hip-hop and R&B station, and another Gangsta Grillz show on Sirius satellite radio, and they jointly own the Aphilliates Music Group. The men have been friends since they met at college a decade ago, and they have an easy rhythm with one another, like teammates who play pickup basketball every week and can pass or negotiate a pick without making eye contact. All three wear the collective’s signature neck chain with a diamond-encrusted pendant in the shape of the letter A.

Drama, whose mother is a white education professor and whose father is a black civil rights activist, has expressive brown eyes and a closely trimmed beard. He usually wears a baseball cap backward or propped loosely atop his light brown hair, cocked to the side. Although his workday rarely starts before noon, he comes across as a savvy businessman. Most of the time he doesn’t say much, but it’s clear he is always paying close attention to what is going on around him. When he is in the studio, about to lay down a Gangsta Grillz “drop” (a phrase that is repeated throughout a mixtape), or when he has to tell a bouncer that no, he won’t stand behind that velvet rope, he rocks back and forth, building his energy, then barks out a torrent of speech, after which he seems to retreat back into himself again. He has a quiet, focused energy that can seem gruff; around Sense and Cannon, though, he gets goofy.

Cannon is a huge guy — 6-foot-6 and 250 pounds — with a lumbering gait and a sweet, unguarded smile. He sometimes spends 24 hours at a stretch in the studio, hunched over a mixing board and a computer running Pro Tools, taking breaks to play video games. He loves to shop, and he especially likes to visit high-end Atlanta malls to buy Prada cologne and examine the jewelry. His enormous sneaker collection takes up the bulk of his apartment’s walk-in closet, as well as the trunk of his Chevy Tahoe S.U.V. and most of a storage space he rents by the month.

Sense is known as the visionary with the business ideas, the one who operates mostly behind the scenes. He is short and just a little bit nerdy. Once when we were in the studio at WHTA, a D.J. named Mami Chula wandered in while a song was playing. She gave Sense a look, shook her head and mused aloud, “I just never saw someone with such a small head.” Sense didn’t say anything, just gave her an indignant look. It seemed as if he was accustomed to being teased.

The day after the raid, when Drama and Cannon were each released from jail on $100,000 bonds, they drove straight to the WHTA studios, went on the air and promoted their coming label releases. There’s a video on YouTube that shows the scene: Drama swaggers into the studio in a white T-shirt and a gray zip-up track-suit jacket, his diamond “A” chain swinging across his chest.

The D.J.’s on air were known as the Durrty Boyz, and one of them announced that they had an “exclusive interview to find out what the hell is going on with Gangsta Grillz.” He asked the accused felons to get close to the microphone.

Cannon murmured: “It’s Don Cannon. Holla at me.”

DJ Sense, who also goes by the name Trendsetter, said: “Yeah, yeah, you know what it is. The boy T-t-t-t-t-t-trendsetta! Holla at your boy!”

Drama, who sometimes calls himself “Mr. Thanksgiving” because, he says, he “feeds the whole industry,” said: “Thanksgiving is every year, man. It doesn’t go nowhere. Do you understand what that means? It’s a holiday, it’s every year. . . . It’s not going nowhere. DJ Drama! I am in full effect.”

After the Durrty Boyz spun a Ying Yang Twins song, Drama took calls at a rapid clip, and he responded to nearly every question or message of support with a reminder of the Aphilliates’ coming Gangsta Grillz release on Atlantic.

One female caller, particularly incensed, demanded, “Can I speak to Drama?”

“What’s up?” Drama asked. “What’s good?”

“Drama, what happened? . . . I mean, come on now, you went to jail?”

“I mean, for a quick minute,” Drama replied. “I am home, though.”

“Uh-uh! We ain’t having that. Don Cannon, Trendsetter, do I need to fight somebody?”

“We’re gonna need you,” Drama said. “We’re gonna start a whole campaign. . . . You know the Gangsta Grillz album is coming out, right?”

“Oh, for real?”

In 1996, Sense and Drama, then both freshmen majoring in mass communications, met in Brawley Hall, their dorm at Clark Atlanta University. C.A.U. is part of the country’s largest consortium of historically black colleges, directly abutting Morehouse and Spelman. Drama and Sense were both aspiring D.J.’s, and they were both from Philadelphia. After they met, they competed in a local D.J. battle and became friends. The following year they met Cannon, also a D.J. from Philadelphia (“Aphilliates” combines the Phil of Philadelphia with an A for Atlanta), and the three became inseparable. Each D.J. found his own niche: Sense interned at WHTA, Cannon spun records at college parties and Drama started selling his own mixtapes. Every night in his apartment, Drama made 10 copies of his latest cassette, and the next day he brought them to campus. Between classes, he would set up a cheap yellow boom box on a major promenade at C.A.U. known as the Strip and offer tapes for sale. He also sold tapes at Georgia State, where he would tell customers that the identity of DJ Drama was a mystery. “I’d tell them I never met Drama, I don’t know the guy, I just work for him,” he told me.

In his junior year, in 1998, Drama put together a compilation of Southern hip-hop, which was beginning to emerge nationally as a distinct sound and style. Often called dirty South, it was more dance-oriented and melodic and raunchier than hip-hop from either coast. That mixtape, “Jim Crow Laws,” sold well, and Drama decided to start a Southern series, which he named Gangsta Grillz. Amateur mistakes were made early on — “we actually spelled ‘Grillz’ with an S,” Drama recalled — but the series quickly took off. Through Sense, Drama met a young local rapper named Lil Jon, who had helped invent a frenetic new style of hip-hop known as crunk. Drama asked Lil Jon to be the host of a mixtape, and Jon did a manic series of drops throughout Gangsta Grillz No. 4. It was the first CD that Drama was able to get into stores.

Around the time Drama was hitting his stride, a young entrepreneur named Jason Geter was working as a manager for T.I., then a little-known artist from Atlanta’s Bankhead housing projects signed to an imprint of Arista. Geter wasn’t happy with the label’s marketing of T.I.’s first album, so he undertook his own promotions, independently shooting a video and printing up T-shirts. Geter said that he started seeing Drama’s mixtapes everywhere — in barbershops and record stores. (“Drama was the most consistent guy doing mixtapes in Atlanta,” he told me. “Some of the other people didn’t even have covers for the CDs, but Drama stood out.”) One night Geter called Drama and asked if he could bring T.I. by Drama’s home studio to do some drops and freestyles on a mixtape.

Drama was ecstatic. “At that point, no one was really checking for me,” he told me. “I hadn’t had a call in three months.” After the impromptu recording session, Geter started giving Drama unreleased T.I. songs and eventually asked him to produce and release a whole CD of T.I.’s work. When T.I.’s mixtape “Down With the King” sold well, other managers started taking their artists to Drama’s studio. The first mixtape Drama was paid by a label to produce was “Tha Streetz Iz Watchin,” which Def Jam’s CTE label hired him to make with Young Jeezy in 2004, in order to build up hype for a coming CD. When Jeezy’s official release, “Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101,” came out in 2005, bearing a bonus track from the Drama mixtape, it sold two million copies.

At least once a week last fall, Jason Brown, the 30-year-old promotions director for the Aphilliates, could be found making a circuit of Atlanta with boxes of Drama’s new releases stacked in the back of his Chevy Tahoe. The trip often took as long as nine hours. The Thursday I rode with Brown, he was carrying copies of two mixtapes Drama had recently recorded in the studio with Lil Keke and Lil Boosie, who are popular in their home regions — Louisiana and South Texas, respectively — but have not yet broken out nationally. Brown drove down the parkways and roads of Atlanta’s low-income black suburbs, past a landscape of Waffle Houses, custom rim shops and halal meat stores, stopping in with his wares at flea markets and little mom-and-pop record shops.

At around 3 p.m., we pulled into the parking lot of Backstage Records, a small, tidy shop across the street from the Greenbriar Mall, a locale frequently mentioned in hip-hop lyrics. (Ludacris: “Any charges set against me, chunk it up and stand tall/Next year I’m lookin’ into buyin’ Greenbriar Mall.”) Brown tucked a stack of CDs under each arm and headed into the store. He greeted the owner, a short broad man in his late 20s named Vic XL.

“How many you want?” Brown asked XL, holding out the Keke and Boosie CDs.

“Whoa!” XL said, excited. “Boosie is overdue for a mixtape.” XL told me that Boosie’s major-label release, “Bad Azz,” on Asylum Records, was not selling well, but, he explained, “he’s a hood artist,” so that wasn’t a big surprise.

XL inspected both discs and placed his order: “I’m gonna take five.” As Brown started to count CDs off his pile, XL looked again at the liner notes and reconsidered: “No, 10 each.”

A small record store like Backstage rarely orders more than 10 copies of any CD, and Drama’s distribution system meets XL’s needs better than the mainstream distribution system does. If XL wants just 10 copies of the new Lil Scrappy CD, he can’t buy them directly from the label’s distributors as chains like Best Buy do. Instead, he has to go through a middleman called a one-stop, which charges XL $10.75 for a CD that retails at Best Buy for $9.99.

The economics of mixtapes appeal to XL, and so do their politics; as he sees it, mixtapes undermine the power of major record labels and radio stations. “Most artists can’t afford to get their music on the radio, but an artist has the right to let his fan base hear what he’s done,” XL said. “Who is the label to dictate how to feed the fan base?”

Mixtapes have long played an important role in hip-hop. In the late 1970s, before rap music was ever recorded onto vinyl or played on a radio station, people found out about hip-hop acts through live recordings of D.J. sets from block parties or clubs. Those cassette recordings were duplicated by hand and sold on the street or in record stores, and given free to gypsy-cab drivers in the Bronx as promotional tools. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, mixtapes remained an important subculture. In the last five years, though, they have risen to a more prominent place in the industry and made the most successful D.J.’s rich.

Mixtapes fill a void left by the consolidation of record labels and radio stations. In the mid-1990s, sales of independent hip-hop albums exceeded those from major releases. But those smaller independent labels were bought out by major labels, and in the late ’90s, the last major independent distributor collapsed. This left few routes for unknown hip-hop artists to enter the market; it also made the stakes higher for major labels, which wanted a better return on their investment. As Jeff Chang, author of “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” a history of hip-hop, told me recently, “The whole industry shifted to massive economies of scale, and mixtapes are a natural outgrowth and response to that.”

Mixtape D.J.’s came to be seen as the first tier of promotions for hip-hop artists, a stepping stone to radio play. Labels began aiding and abetting mixtape D.J.’s, sending them separate digital tracks of vocals and beats from songs so they could be easily remixed. They also started sending copies of an artist’s mixtape out to journalists and reviewers along with the official label release. DJ Chuck T, a mixtape D.J. in South Carolina, told me that when label employees send him tracks to include on his mixtapes, they request a copy of the mixtape so that they can show their bosses the track is “getting spin from the street.” He also said record-label promoters want sales figures for his mixtapes so they can chart sales patterns, which they use in marketing their own releases.

Mixtape D.J.’s have effectively absorbed many of the functions of an A&R department, the branch of a record label that traditionally discovers and develops new talent. Ron Stewart, a promotions coordinator at Jive Records, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music, told me he prefers to test new artists out on mixtapes. “Budget permitting,” he said, “we’d do a few mixtapes with a few D.J.’s, because they have different audiences in different regions.” Labels prefer to use established mixtape D.J.’s like Drama, rather than produce promotional CDs themselves, Stewart said, because “the best D.J.’s have a better brand than the average label does.”

Although the deals are informal and often secret, labels typically pay a prominent D.J. like Drama $10,000 to $15,000 to produce a mixtape for an artist. The label’s representatives, Stewart explained, adopt what amounts to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about the D.J.’s plans to sell the work; what the D.J. does with his copy of the master, Stewart said, “is his own business.” For successful D.J.’s, mixtape sales can bring considerable revenue. Mixtapes sell for anywhere from $5 to $10 on the street or on a Web site like Mixunit, and overhead is low, since the CDs cost only about 50 cents to manufacture and D.J.’s rarely pay royalties or licensing fees.

Although many hip-hop artists view mixtapes as an essential way to build their careers, some are critical of aspects of the system. One editor of a hip-hop magazine, who would comment only anonymously, told me: “In the aftermath of the raid, talking to artists, the stuff they say when Drama’s not around — there is a little bit of animosity, because he is clearly making money off these artists. They all saw his car being towed off on TV. What was it? A Maserati?”

Killer Mike, an Atlanta rapper who is signed to Sony and who has been featured on a number of DJ Drama’s mixtapes, told me he is not really a “supporter” of mixtapes. “That doesn’t mean I don’t play mixtapes in my car and listen to other peoples’ mixtapes, but as an artist, I feel the amount of rhymes you have to write to put out a mixtape is the same amount you have to for an album,” he said. “I’d rather put out albums over my own beats than use other people’s beats and have a problem later.”

Pimp C, a Texas rapper who is half of the popular underground hip-hop duo UGK, has repeatedly refused to participate in a UGK mixtape despite requests by his record label and, he said, from countless mixtape D.J.’s. Pimp C told me that because there is no paper trail, mixtape D.J.’s are able to invent sales figures, and they routinely claim that, after their overhead, they just break even. But based on his experience producing two of his own mixtapes, Pimp C suspects D.J.’s make plenty; they just don’t want to give artist a cut. “Every time I was approached by a mixtape D.J., they tried to sell me the dream there was no money in it, and it was something artists need to do to help their album sales,” he said. “But I know how much bread can be made. . . . If you’re making money, chop it up with me.”

Before DJ Drama went to jail, no mixtape D.J. had been the target of a major raid; busts had been directed at small retailers, like Mondo Kim’s in New York’s East Village. Jonathan Lamy, a spokesperson for the R.I.A.A., said the raid on Drama’s studio represented no official change in policy and had been undertaken only at the behest of Atlanta law enforcement. But for many in the industry, the focus on a single prominent figure seemed like no accident. “Arresting them criminally under RICO was firing a warning shot at anyone who has mixtapes,” said Walter McDonough, a copyright lawyer who has negotiated with the R.I.A.A. on behalf of Jay-Z.

Others pointed to the selective nature of the crackdown as evidence that the raid was a deliberate effort — major retailers like Best Buy were not raided, even though they carry many of the same CDs Drama was arrested for selling. The R.I.A.A. “would have to know nothing about the industry they are monitoring not to realize this stuff is all over Best Buy and FYE,” says Eric Steuer, the creative director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit that works to develop more flexible copyright arrangements for artists and producers. “Maybe they leave them alone because the major chains have promotion deals with record labels.”

Ted Cohen, a former executive at EMI Records who now runs a music-consulting business, told me that the raid was typical of the music industry’s “schizophrenic” approach to promotions; a label’s marketing department wants to get its artists’ songs in front of as many people as possible, even if it means allowing or ignoring free downloads or unlicensed videos on YouTube. But the business department wants to collect royalties. “It is a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” Cohen said.

Drama’s arrest shook up mixtape D.J.’s and promoters across the country. But even in the days immediately following the raid, D.J.’s continued to release tapes — some with hastily added tracks on which rappers cursed the R.I.A.A. — and major labels continued to e-mail them new tracks. Some in the industry speculated that things would have to change, that mixtapes would either move further underground or become legitimate licensed products. But no one I spoke with thought the arrest would permanently damage Drama’s career. In fact, Julia Beverly, the editor of Ozone, a Southern hip-hop magazine, suggested that it was more likely to improve his image and album sales. “Really, this takes him to a gangsta level,” she said. “It gives him a little something extra. It’s messed up, but if someone goes to jail or dies, it elevates his status and just makes him more of a star than he was before. That’s the way the entertainment industry works in general. So, having cops at your door with M-16’s at your head, and MTV News reporting on the raid, calling you the biggest D.J. in the world? You can’t pay for that type of look.”

Samantha M. Shapiro is a contributing writer.

Academy Awards to Use DJ

New York Times
February 18, 2007
A Night Out With Liza Richardson
Strike Up the Turntable
By MONICA CORCORAN

WEST HOLLYWOOD

EVERY performer has a different definition of a tough crowd, from comedy clubs in Berlin to the buffet-obsessed folks aboard a cruise ship.

“You can’t pay me enough to play a wedding,” said Liza Richardson, a professional D.J., as she sipped a dirty martini here at the Italian bistro Dominick’s. “The couple has their list of favorite songs and then, you have to please the parents and maybe even the grandparents.”

A week from today, Ms. Richardson will be spinning tunes at the ultimate Hollywood wedding: the Academy Awards. Tense guys wearing tuxedos? Check. Rambling, awkward speeches that make everyone’s toes curl? Check. A crowd ranging in age from starlet to septuagenarian? Check.

She is the first-ever Oscar D.J., and admits that she is as nervous as a nominee.

“My job is to keep the mood upbeat and to keep everyone from wandering off to the bar during commercials,” said Ms. Richardson, 42, who will be playing three-minute sets from a suspended booth during untelevised breaks. “But my personal goal is to get Forest Whitaker to look up and give me a thumbs up.”

At that very moment on this recent Friday night, though, it was a roasted branzino with glassy eyes that was ogling her.

“Whoa! What? How?” Ms. Richardson exclaimed, fork in hand.

She and her friend Tereza Scharf, who is married to the artist Kenny Scharf, summoned a waiter. When he politely told them that the chef preferred patrons to fillet their own fish, the two didn’t fuss. They shrugged and gingerly dug in.

Ms. Richardson, who is as slender as a tulip stem and feline in her demeanor, wore a mint green minidress by the up-and-coming London designer Christopher Kane and minimal makeup. When she laughed, her head jerked backward as if someone had tugged at her long light-brown hair.

In Los Angeles, Ms. Richardson has a devout following for her weekly Saturday night radio show devoted to underground funk and house music called “The Drop” on KCRW. Techno music lovers melt at the mere mention of her name. She worked as music supervisor on the films “Lords of Dogtown” and “Failure to Launch,” and currently oversees the soundtrack for the NBC show “Friday Night Lights.”

Ms. Richardson and Ms. Scharf chatted about Beat poets, the current resurgence in Italo-disco music, and tinnitus. (Ms. Richardson, like most D.J.’s, is quite sure that she will need a hearing aid at some point in her career.)

When the topic veered to how the masses process music, a discussion on the dearth of modern philosophers ensued. “I don’t think music has replaced philosophy because people want songs to be so surface,” said Ms. Scharf, who is Brazilian. “But what else moves people on so many levels?”

After espressos, the two hopped into Ms. Richardson’s white station wagon and headed to a pre-Grammy party in Hollywood held by her manager and other music industry executives.

“Oh boy! I think we have to just dive in,” she said, upon arriving in a courtyard packed with a young (mostly male, scruffy-chinned) crowd. Ms. Richardson chatted with a few guests and nursed a plastic cup of vodka.

The two decamped shortly after 1 a.m. Plans for moving on to an underground D.J. party in Venice were trumped by Ms. Richardson’s intention to go surfing at dawn. “The industry isn’t about sleazy, rich music producers anymore because there’s not enough money,” she said, referring to the decidedly unpolished scene they left behind. “Now, it’s just a bunch of young guys hustling.”

DJ arrested for mixtapes

NYTimes
January 18, 2007
With Arrest of DJ Drama, the Law Takes Aim at Mixtapes
By KELEFA SANNEH

In the world of hip-hop few music executives have more influence than DJ Drama. His “Gangsta Grillz” compilations have helped define this decade’s Southern rap explosion. He has been instrumental in the careers of rappers like Young Jeezy and Lil Wayne. He appears on the cover of the March issue of the hip-hop magazine XXL, alongside his friend and business partner T.I., the top-selling rapper of 2006. And later this year DJ Drama is scheduled to make his Atlantic Records debut with “Gangsta Grillz: The Album.”

Now DJ Drama is yet another symbol of the music industry’s turmoil and confusion.

On Tuesday night he was arrested with Don Cannon, a protégé. The police, working with the Recording Industry Association of America, raided his office, at 147 Walker Street in Atlanta. The association makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for. So the police confiscated 81,000 discs, four vehicles, recording gear, and “other assets that are proceeds of a pattern of illegal activity,” said Chief Jeffrey C. Baker, from the Morrow, Ga., police department, which participated in the raid.

DJ Drama (whose real name is Tyree Simmons) and Mr. Cannon were each charged with a felony violation of Georgia’s Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization law(known as RICO) and held on $100,000 bond.

The compilations produced by DJ Drama and his protégés are known as mixtapes, though they appear on CDs, not cassettes. Mixtapes have become a vital part of the hip-hop world. They are often the only way for listeners to keep up with a genre that moves too quickly to be captured on albums. On a mixtape you can hear unreleased remixes, sneak previews from coming CDs, casual freestyle rhymes, never-to-be-released goofs.

Mixtapes are, by definition, unregulated: DJs don’t get permission from record companies, and record companies have traditionally ignored and sometimes bankrolled mixtapes, reasoning that they serve as valuable promotional tools. And rappers have grown increasingly canny at using mixtapes to promote themselves. The career of 50 Cent has a lot to do with his mastery of the mixtape form, and now no serious rapper can afford to be absent from this market for too long.

As mixtapes evolved from a street-corner phenomenon to a cornerstone of the hip-hop industry, record companies tried to figure out ways to cash in. Mixtape D.J.’s like DJ Clue, DJ Kay Slay and others have released major-label compilations full of tracks that abide by copyright rules. But it’s not easy to turn a mixtape into something you can legally sell: part of the fun is hearing rappers remake one another’s songs and respond to one another’s taunts; a great mixtape captures the controlled chaos that hip-hop thrives on.

DJ Drama’s mixtapes are often great. He has turned “Gangsta Grillz” into a prestige brand: each is a carefully compiled disc, full of exclusive tracks, devoted to a single rapper who is also the host. Rappers often seem proud to be considered good enough for a “Gangsta Grillz” mixtape. On “Dedication,” the first of his two excellent “Gangsta Grillz” mixtapes, Lil Wayne announces, “I hooked up with dude, now we ’bout to make history.” The compilation showed off Lil Wayne more effectively than his albums ever had, and “Dedication” helped revive his career. When some unreleased tracks by T.I. leaked to the Internet, T.I. teamed up with DJ Drama for a pre-emptive strike: together, they created a mixtape called “The Leak.”

As mixtapes have grown more popular, they have also grown easier to purchase, despite that official-sounding declaration — “For Promotional Use Only” — printed on every one. Sites like mixunit.com specialize in selling them, and big record shops and online stores have followed suit. As of yesterday DJ Drama was sitting in jail, but dozens of his unlicensed compilations were still available at the iTunes shop.

Brad A. Buckles, executive vice president for anti-piracy at the Recording Industry Association of America, said, “A sound recording is either copyrighted or it’s not.” And he said the DJ Drama case, like most piracy cases, began with illegal product, which was then traced back to the distributor. Chief Baker said that before the raid, DJ Drama and Mr. Cannon were sent cease-and-desist letters from a local lawyer.

There have been mixtape busts before: in 2005, five employees of Mondo Kim’s, in the East Village in New York, were jailed after the store was found to be selling unlicensed mixtapes. But the arrest of a figure as prominent as DJ Drama is unprecedented. Record companies usually portray the fight against piracy as a fight for artists’ rights, but this case complicates that argument: most of DJ Drama’s mixtapes begin with enthusiastic endorsements from the artists themselves.

It also seems clear that mixtapes can actually bolster an artist’s sales. The most recent Lil Wayne solo album, “Tha Carter II” (Cash Money/Universal), sold more than a million copies, though none of its singles climbed any higher than No. 32 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. That’s an impressive feat, and it’s hard to imagine how he would have done it without help from a friendly pirate.

Brenda Goodman contributed reporting from Atlanta.

Payback for a hip-hop pioneer

Chicago Tribune
MUSIC: PREVIEW

Payback for a hip-hop pioneer

By Patrick Sisson
Special to the Tribune

January 12, 2007

"The Payoff Mix," a Frankenstein according to one of its creators, was a song that raised questions that still haunt artists and record labels.

In 1983, New York producer Steve Stein and his friend Douglas DiFranco, a studio engineer, created the tune, a technically precise and occasionally humorous reworking of "Play that Beat Mr. D.J." by G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid, and entered it in a remix contest sponsored by the Tommy Boy label.

While it wasn't the first track to juxtapose samples, it was certainly memorable. Recording under the name Double Dee & Steinski, the pair blended the original track's early hip-hop beats with dozens of unauthorized musical samples including a snippet from a Boy George song and a Humphrey Bogart vocal clip from "Casablanca."

The duo went on to record two similar tracks, "The James Brown Mix" and "History of Hip-Hop," which together with "The Payoff Mix" are collectively known as The Lessons, before amicably splitting up in 1985. The pair received $100 and a few T-shirts for their contest victory at the time, but the tracks have since lived on as early examples of the potential and artistry of sampling.

"There was nothing that got in our way, certainly not copyright," said Steinski, who appears at the Smart Bar on Friday. "The vapor and fog of intellectual property was not so thick as it is now. We had completely molded this piece and made this Frankenstein monster."

While "The Payoff Mix" received limited radio play after it won the contest, the "monster" never saw official release, since clearing all the samples would have been a nightmarish task for the Tommy Boy legal staff. (While numerous bootleg versions of the tracks have been pressed, Steinski says the original prize from Tommy Boy is the only money he's ever made from The Lessons.)

But those issues didn't discourage the now 55-year-old producer from making more musical mixes that blend genres and freely plunder from pop culture. Performing a deejay set Thursday at Smart Bar along with Zulu Nation founder and hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, Steinski is continuing to embrace the hip-hop notion of re-purposing and re-defining music.

"I play anything I get a hold of that works for me," he said. "That's my definition of what hip-hop is."

During recent deejay gigs in the United States and Europe, Steinski, who has a day job in advertising, blends everything from Brazilian and soul music to hip-hop and obscure vocal samples with a popular computer program named Ableton Live. He's also recorded, but never released, numerous cut-and-paste-style bootlegs since The Lessons, including "The Motorcade Sped On," a 1986 track about the Kennedy assassination that adds a funky beat to Walter Cronkite's somber announcements, and "It's Up to You," a satiric mosaic of music and quotations by former president George H. W. Bush mixed during the Gulf War.

"For a long time, up to the beginning of 2006, I accepted the idea of what I was doing was illegal," said Steinski. "It was very much off the edge. And then I started reading stuff by Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar who invented the Creative Commons idea of copyright, and it really opened me up to the idea that certain things shouldn't be locked up the way they are, unavailable to artists. It's like this amazing digital technology is being completely crippled for the benefit of major corporations."

More than 20 years after The Lessons, digital technology has made similar musical re-combinations, sometimes called mash-ups, not just easier but commonplace. Acquiring, sampling and rearranging songs requires nothing more than an Internet-connected computer and some easy-to-use software--certainly not the studio expertise, time and crates of vinyl records that Double Dee & Steinski had to use in the '80s.

The popularity of these post-modern audio collages reflects Steinski's influence on current hip-hop artists. He appeared in the 2001 turntablism documentary "Scratch" and was asked to make a mix for the hip Stones Throw label. Both DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist performed with Steinski during a live re-enactment of The Lessons in San Francisco in 2000 and both made tracks called Lesson Four in honor of the original.

"At that time, I think The Lessons were the first of their kind," said Cut Chemist. "It was way more intricate than other mix records. And you could definitely tell they were coming from a more hip-hop angle. They were just utilizing all these obscure breaks. Steinski is the king of the dialogue record. He kind of flipped my wig when I played with him. He dropped this sample from a record about sewing that went, `I spend hours at my sampler.' In a million years, I couldn't find something that dope."

Digital technology has also kept alive, and in most cases inflamed, the legal issues that prevented The Lessons from ever receiving official release. Labels feel that unauthorized sampling of music violates copyright laws and allows the sampling artist to illegally profit from the original artist's work.

Artists feel that the absolute control over copyright and the hefty fees labels charge for sampling discourages artistic freedom and puts an unfair and often unrealistic price tag on material that should be in the public domain. It also discounts the amount of work that goes into making original, creative recordings.

And, more than 20 years after Steinski helped make The Lessons, an equitable solution that artists and labels agree upon still hasn't been discovered.

Gregg Gillis, who records for the Bloomington, Ill.-based Illegal Art label under the name Girl Talk, released "Night Ripper" last year, a critically acclaimed album meticulously constructed from hundreds of small, sometimes microscopic, samples of popular hip-hop, dance and indie rock songs that weren't cleared by the major labels.

Gillis has been a staple at nightclubs this year, but according to Illegal Art founder Philo T. Farnsworth, there's only so much profit Illegal Art can gain from the album before the music industry might begin to file lawsuits. He feels it's silly, since there's a market for this work and more flexible copyright laws could be enacted that would ensure everyone involved made a fair buck from the album.

"The Steinski stuff was a good example," said Farnsworth. "It was such a huge underground hit and if the industry could have made a way for it to have existed legally, they could have been profited from that material.

"They're shooting themselves in the foot by limiting certain types of expression."

- - -

Birth of a movement

Were it not for sampling pioneer Steve Stein (a.k.a. Steinski) and Afrika Bambaataa, the first rapper ever, so much might not exist--such as the work of:

RUN-DMC

Public Enemy

Biz Markie

Wu-Tang Clan

Beastie Boys

Chemical Brothers

Danger Mouse

Girl Talk

Story on Thievery Corporation

10 Years Later, Duo Is Still Thick as Thieves

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 15, 2006; WE09

Consider Thievery Corporation's four-night stand at the 9:30 club Wednesday through Dec. 23 as part holiday party and part 10th anniversary celebration for the Washington-based production and DJ duo Rob Garza and Eric Hilton and their Eighteenth Street Lounge label. There will also be a series of after-concert parties at the Lounge (entry is free with a Thievery Corporation/9:30 club ticket) as well as a Dec. 22 concert at the Rock and Roll Hotel with three ESL acts.

But then it's back to work: beginning preparations for another studio album, Thievery Corporation's sixth, and the new album by Argentine guitarist Federico Aubele. (Hilton was putting finishing touches on it last weekend.) There's also a new ESL subsidiary, the more rock-oriented ViviColorSound, whose first release will be Garza's new rock-oriented side project, Dust Galaxy.

And Hilton has been busy editing "Babylon Central," which he describes as "a low-budget feature shot in high definition so it looks good." Shot locally with a mostly amateur cast, "it's very much about D.C.: cross-cultural threads, music threads, conspiratorial political threads, a love story. There's a lot going on in a 90-minute movie," says Hilton, who hopes to have a rough cut in the next month. Thievery may release it itself, or it may find a distributor. Hilton insists: "I don't have any delusions of grandeur. I've never made a movie before."

Of course, it wasn't that long ago Hilton could say he'd never made a record. Blame it on the bossa nova (at least partly). It's one of the musical styles that bonded Hilton and Garza when the two suburban Marylanders met in 1995 at the then-new Eighteenth Street Lounge opened by Hilton and some friends. Both had wide listening palettes -- punk (DC/Dischord punk in particular) and the edgier ends of rock, dancehall and dub, hip-hop and house, classic soul, jazz and, it turns out, bossa nova, a music first popularized in the United States by 1962's Stan Getz/Charlie Byrd album, "Jazz Samba," recorded at All Souls Unitarian Church just a few blocks from Thievery Corporation Central on Calvert Street NW.

Both Hilton and Garza were DJs and producers with inclinations toward what's now known as down-tempo electronica (a.k.a. chill, a.k.a. lounge). At the time, Hilton says, he "had more hopes and expectations for the lounge than for my own music career. It was a good location, and we were all into a certain kind of music that we could finally play every night in our own spot. DJ-ing there really inspired me to get back to it, and about a month into it, I met Rob."

They moved to a friend's apartment, "put our studio gear together, which was very minimal, and just worked on a track for four hours. And after four hours, it was pretty much finished -- the fastest either of us had ever made a decent piece of music." That first Hilton-Garza collaboration, "Far East Coast," came out credited to Exodus Quartet, a band Hilton had formed a few years earlier with Fari Ali to re-create the experience of the local Exodus acid jazz club, "but it was very Thievery-sounding," Hilton says.

In the early days, "we'd get together in the evenings, have a couple of beers and play records and play music -- experimenting with different sounds, seeing what would come of mixing all these [elements] in a recording studio. We pressed a couple of vinyl singles and thought that was great when they sold and people liked them."

In 1996, those people included producers Kruder & Dorfmeister, who licensed the "Shaolin Satellite" 12-inch for a volume in the popular "DJ Kicks" series. Day jobs -- Hilton managing the Lounge, Garza working for his father's aviation security and counterterrorism business while taking classes at community college -- suddenly seemed less interesting, or necessary. A decade later, Garza says he's still "really surprised. For me, it was just a hobby, and the same thing for Eric -- he'd try to sneak in some time when he wasn't managing the bar."

According to Hilton, "we pressed the CD [1997's 'Sounds From the Thievery Hi-Fi'] and sold the first 1,000 copies the first day, so we reordered and reordered, and, before you knew it, we were on the road to owning a label, doing more records. It just sort of happened step by step, very gradual."

Along the way, the two moved from underground status to low-key ubiquity: Their music has been in video games (albeit for cricket and golf, though the golf game was for Tiger Woods); commercials (Dockers, Citibank, Lincoln); television ("The West Wing," "ER," "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City") and movie soundtracks ("Vanilla Sky," the remake of "Psycho" and the Grammy-winning "Garden State," which used "Lebanese Blonde," the duo's only sort-of-a-hit).

One of the things that distinguished Thievery was its embrace of world sounds, not just from Brazil and Jamaica, but from India, the Middle East, West Africa and elsewhere. For that, Garza and Hilton thank the bars and restaurants of the multicultural Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle neighborhoods, where they hung out.

"Washington's a very cosmopolitan city," Garza says, "and at the time, we were going to all these bars where you could hear Brazilian music or reggae or West African music. On any given night, you could just go out and dive into all this great music."

It's where they met singer Pam Bricker, a master of jazz and Brazilian music who would be a big part of the first three Thievery albums (it's her vocals on "Lebanese Blonde") and who toured with them before her suicide in 1995.

Hilton remembers "going to Second Story Books in Bethesda and picking up really collectible Brazilian records for $3 that cost $100 on the Internet and were probably dropped off by someone who worked at the Brazilian Embassy."

Sometimes, he and Garza found inspiration around the corner or down the block. LouLou, who has contributed Thievery vocals in English, French and Farsi, was working as a waitress and manager at Tryst on 18th Street NW and hanging around the studio with her then-boyfriend, reggae singer Rootz, when Hilton and Garza heard her singing, decided to try her on some grooves and "knew we had to do something," Garza says. Colombian percussionist Verny Varela and Brazilian singer Patrick DeSantos were discovered when Hilton and Garza were "hanging out at the Rumba Cafe drinking mojitos and checking out the music. That we've been able to pull really talented people from our own back yard is really great," Garza says. Local vocalists performing at Thievery's 9:30 shows include Verela, LouLou, Sista Pat and Rootz & Zeebo, who will also perform with their dancehall reggae band See-I at the Eighteenth Street Lounge on Wednesday with guest Sleepy Wonder.

"It's a D.C. thing, and we're very fortunate," Hilton says.

That also accounts for an increasing political consciousness that first appeared on 2002's "The Richest Man in Babylon" and became more evident on last year's "The Cosmic Game." Among that album's offerings: "Marching the Hate Machines (Into the Sun)," a peace anthem collaboration with Wayne Coyne and Flaming Lips, and "The Revolution Solution" with guest singer Perry Farrell. Thievery also helped organize the massive Operation Ceasefire concert last year on the Mall protesting the war in Iraq.

"It's part of our personal growth," Hilton says. "We've seen a lot of things go down in the last six years that made us wonder and think and change our perspective."

There are historic inspirations, Dischord and Positive Force locally, punk and reggae generally, but it's a relatively new element in the world of electronic music, Hilton says. "We've been fighting that whole 'lounge music' pigeonhole for a long time. It's such a broad category -- anything that doesn't have abrasive edges is thrown into the lounge category. We didn't want to exclude our sound from that type of positive energy."

Garza has been putting the finishing touches on his Dust Galaxy debut, recorded in London with British producer Brendan Lynch (Paul Weller, Primal Scream, Asian Dub Foundation, Ocean Colour Scene). "It was fun going over there and working with a bunch of different musicians and creating some new things," Garza said last week from a Munich airport as Dust Galaxy was on its way to Amsterdam after dates in Greece, Spain and Portugal. Guest musicians on the album include several members of Primal Scream and Adam Blake of Cornershop, but the touring band comprises a few Washington-based musicians: drummer Jerry Busher (Fugazi's roadie and "second drummer"), guitarist James Canty (the Make-Up, the Pharmacists) and bassist Ashish Vyas.

"It's been wild," says Garza, admitting that a new mindset has been necessary fronting a band rather than being a behind-the-scenes operator. "You get up and you really have to deliver the songs -- it's a different intensity of performing."

Ironically, Hilton is the Corporation man who'd played in rock bands before making what he calls "an electronic segue. I started out trying to make the whole Dischord sound with high school friends -- it wasn't hard, you just had to play fast and have strong wrists!"

"When Rob first started doing Dust Galaxy, I started worrying he was never going to do Thievery Corporation again, but after a year to process that and to work on my own, I realize everybody needs a break from what they're doing, and I think it's a healthy thing for him and for me."

Dust Galaxy performs Dec. 21 at Eighteenth Street Lounge. Other singers include Sleepy Wonder and Karina Zeviani, and the full band will feature bass, guitar, sitar, two percussionists, live horns, Garza on keyboards and effects, and Hilton on beats.