We’re very pleased to announce that our new album is now finally and officially released! All Rights Reserved is now available as a double CD, on vinyl, or download.

It’s just a shame you can’t listen to it.

“The lawyers had concerns,” ECC’s TradeMark Gunderson explains. “Although we felt tracks like our ‘What Would You Think If I Sang AutoTune’ were clearly parody as well as Fair Use, the legal types thought they were lawsuit-bait.” To give the label and the band an extra line of legal defense, the album includes a Listener License Agreement, a set of terms and conditions like those required in order to install computer software. “Fair Use or not, a track like’Stairway To Britney’ could easily offend a litigious party,” says Seeland Industries lawyer Sandy Kryle. “We thought the best solution would be a legal agreement that forbids anyone — everyone — from listening. Period.”

Even with the Listener License Agreement, the product was too hot for some to handle. Both the pressing plant as well as the distributor initially refused to handle the album, saying that All Rights Reserved was too risky — a surprising reaction in an era when even Girl Talk can’t muster a single major label complaint.

“We’re not crazy about the idea of suing our fans,” says ECC band member Christy Brand. “But it seems to work for the RIAA.”

You may not want to risk being sued, but for those of us in Cleveland who miss Ghoulardi’s Shock Theater, we can at least spend our Saturday night watching ECC’s version of the silent movie classic Nosferatu, dj’d live using only soundtracks from other movies:

Nosferatu with live Reels Of Steel soundtrack DJ’d by The ECC from Evolution Control Committee on Vimeo.

But no one was there before John Oswald of Plunderphonics. A mere fraction of his career’s chronology demonstrates that he is perhaps the pioneer of the genre:

1973-75

With the sanction of William S. Burroughs, John Oswald cut up recordings of him reading his texts advocating cutting up methods, & consequently discovered an acoustic pallindrome, mediations between backwards & forwards, polysyllabic masking & phase imploding.

1975

Oswald melds a radio evangelist with alleged satanists Led Zepplin in the early rap track POWER. released in 1995 by Musicworks magazine.

1975-85

MYSTERY TAPES assembly & dissemination (by Mystery Tapes Etc.International), include many early plunderphonistic experiments.

1980

Oswald guest produces a one hour radio show for CFRO in Vancouver called Sounds Wrong which includes the first public issues of Dolly Parton & Rite of Spring transformations.

1982

Collusion, a British magazine publishes an article by Oswald, entitled “Revolutions & Mr Dolly Parton – a vortex of of androgeny”.

1985

An essay by John Oswald entitled “Plunderphonics, or, Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative” was presented at the Wired Society conference in Toronto.

1988

The original Plunderphonics EP (never-for-sale, out-of-print) was for its time the most extreme example of sampling ever produced. Four well-known music personalities representing four musical genres & four notable epochs of recording history were presented in surprising ways, or, as the press release put it: warp drive.

1989

The Plunderphonic CD (never-for-sale, remaining stocks destroyed by Michael Jackson & CBS) has become an underground cult classic. The realistic cover photo of a nude Michael Jackson revealed as a white woman paralleled the musical transformations depicted on the disc. Other electroquoted artists included Bing Crosby, The Beatles, Glenn Gould, Public Enemy & (consequently) James Brown.

You can read a more complete biography of Oswald here.

Far more interesting is an extensive recorded interview with Oswald. One of the most fascinating parts of the interview is Oswald’s account of his experience with the overwhelming legal forces brought to bear in the name of copyright enforcement against his new compositions. In a series of events not unlike those experienced by Negativland in connection with their composition U2, every last CD Oswald retained of his recording was destroyed. Of course, he had already distributed some of those CDs and was unable to recover them. And we all know digital media metastasize beyond any capacity of corporate control. So, of course, as with Negativland’s U2, Oswald’s recording not only continues to exist; it is available (for free) for digital downloading.

For your listening pleasure, I include here one track from the album: Glenn Gould-Aria(mp3).

Ballard says he lifted the jackets in a decade-long revenge binge, nicking them from pubs, and once back in his studio, emptied the pockets, cataloged the contents, scribbled poetic notes about each item and never told a soul. The artist’s kleptomania, inspired by the theft of his own prized blue Diesel 55 jacket when he moved to London from North Wales, came to an end in 2009 when he sought therapeutic help. . . .

Since 1999 [Ballard has] walked out of crowded pubs with more than 200 jackets by simply putting them on – his own jacket on top – and sailing out the door. Cheers, folks!

And now, a week before the annual London art orgy – the Frieze Art Fair – Mike Ballard lifts the veil on his secret store of stolen jackets, asking the world to come and get them, to please forgive him, and at the same time lift his star high above the door as he exits through the cloak room, a nod to fellow Brit guerrilla street artist Banksy. The installation in the abandoned Walker’s Tailor shop near the Great Portland Street tube station is a wall-to-wall closet: The jackets hang from the ceiling like sides of beef, tagged, dated and numbered, ready for pick up.

The cocoon of cotton, wool, leather and nylon is impressive in this tiny store. You can’t stand up without getting lost in the stink of beery bars, smoke and body odor which is overwhelming. (The artist is considering spraying Febreze around to deodorize the show, but remains undecided.) He hasn’t worn any of these jackets since he stole them, nor has he smoked any of the hash or spent the cash (about 1000 pounds) he’s found in the pockets; nor has even thought about selling off the diamond ring he discovered. Instead, Mike Ballard turned into an archivist of sorts, cataloging everything down to the loose rolling papers and 2 penny coins, photographing them, and scribbling a bit of prose and poetry as well as the relevant dates and locations of each theft. The texts are printed on tags hanging from the sleeves, along with the cross-referencing numbers which, when flashed against the petitioner’s claim, will prove if in fact this is their stolen jacket.

Atticus’s life instruction to his daughter, Scout. As he explains, “If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” In summer 2009, and again this July, the United States was roiled by debate about Barack Obama’s promise to appoint a supreme court justice who embodies this quality of “empathy”. Scores of critics asserted that judicial empathy is the same as judicial bias; that judges are at their best when they coldly and mechanically apply the law. There is no place for climbing inside anyone else’s skin as a judge. There is only truth and cold fact.

How strange it is, that we have come to a place in the national debate about justice when Atticus Finch’s mild admonition to his daughter to try to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes has become the definition of dangerous judicial activism. While Atticus still has much to teach lawyers about race and violence and prejudice and the rule of law, I have also come to think of him as the patron saint of patient, quiet listening; a quality to which all of us ought to aspire.