What is Radio Clash?

Loving what these guys & gals are doing:

Free Art & Technology Overview from Evan Roth on Vimeo.

Following on from a visit to Public Works on Friday, an organisation about public spaces and art John is involved with I thought most of their projects came off a bit dry, needed the artist input, something funny/humourous with a pop culture touch.

What I was thinking of was something more like the Free Art & Technology group over at Boing Boing (recently allegedly tagging a Google Street View car in Berlin so you can track it on GPS – probably as the comments say with something like this – ability to track stuff on GPS for $85? ME WANT!)

Like the Kopimi station and the Piratebay/Amazon add-on (piggybacking onto existing sites with artwork or counter-cultural things is very now – I assume this is Steve Lambert as I’ve just installed his Add-Art plugin which displays artworks instead of browser ads) and the GML graffiti robot arm Great projects which force the issue by humorously or intentionally breaking the law, activism, or just brilliant ideas…love the cheap Matrix bullet-time too.

The thing is like the scientists who get training about presentation and PR, you need to present your ideas to a wider public with a hook, a meme, a snappy idea or sentence. And if you’re scared of breaking laws or offending grant-making bodies you’ll not actually engage people – because people don’t exist in some safe padded Tellytubbies world those in charge would like them to live in.

Now if the architects and town planning bods over at Public Works got in bed with the rapper/hacker/artists over at FAT…that would be a marriage made in heaven. Or hell, depending on which (Google) view point

This is the role of the 21st century artist – less Klee and more KLF.

I so wish I had stuff like this when I was doing my degree and creating artwork, I was messing with relays and switch circuits and floorpads…but it was 1995, which unless you were in Silicon Valley with rich daddies you couldn’t afford the decent shizzle…now anyone can afford it!

..Die Antwoord. Like if 2 Unlimited or CnC Music Factory grew up as redneck Zef-rap Afrikaaners, played their gameboys, baile funk/carioca, old skool electro and Eminem rather too much, met a strange funsized blonde, met a 24 year old progeria suffering DJ, wearing clothes with an obvious Keith Haring influence then recorded a funny hiphop album with hooks that Black Eyed Peas would reject as too kawaii* sometimes with a donk beat that the Bolton massif would go nuts for. Brilliantly nuts, basically.

So here’s Enter the Ninja – this year’s Tatu meets 2Unlimited meets GLC hybrid. What? You weren’t looking for that? Kak!

As you could have guessed, severely NSFW…

and Zef Side (Zef is Afrikaans for redneck) – love their manifesto/mantra

“To sum it all up, in this place, South Africa, you get a lot of different things: whites, coloureds, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa, Zulu, watookal—I’m like all these different things, all these different people, fucked into one person.”

Thanks to BoingBoing for turning me on to this…I ignored the original posts but the follow ups and Leon Botha (a very good artist) intrigued me…they are blowing up bigstyle (although mostly Internet fame you can’t cash down the bank). And a good interview here – as Yo-Landi put it their philosophy is ‘drive fast and play kak (shit) music loud. It’s a zef rap-rave jol (party), with lasers, smoke machines, 3D graphics, rappers… and everyone’s gonna be there.’ (my translations). Sounds good to me!

For a more academic take on Ninja and co go here – I read Koos Kombuis’s book about Voelvry and James Phillips (odd bloke) so it’s an interesting comparison but some of the politics mentioned there is dodge – yes there are and were progessive Afrikaners but it’s not a far stretch to connect apartheid with Afrikaners since they were in power and nearly all supporting those policies (why Voelvry was so sharply political, and did help the fall of apartheid – cos the ‘good’ Afrikaner kids weren’t supporting their parents bigotry – but it is a stretch to connect Die Antwoord with this movement!). But I can understand the attraction and tensions between British and Afrikaner white South Africans – John grew up there as a Scottish import (must have been annoying to be referred as ‘Inglesman’ when there were more than the English in SA

Anyway I think the ladies doth analyse too much – hearing Afrikaans in humourous GLC-style rap is really funny, fokken lekker And I’d rather these guys and gals get famous than the blandness that is B.E.P…they might be surreal performance art and all playing roles from a previous project – or be the ZA version of The Streets – but when it’s this fun, who actually gives a fokk?

* Japanese for cute, allegedly.

As remixed by Akira the Don and featuring Jay-Z, Dizzee Rascal, Bill Hicks and Haulden Caulfeild from Akira The Don’s mixtape, ATD20.

Great anti-Mandy and anti-paranoia song ‘Only Idiots Assume’ by Broken Dongles who are Liam Mullone and “Blue Remembered” Hils Barker.

Love the kitten line, the BBC Micro comparison and ‘your dad’s got a beard! I bet he’s in Al Qaeda!’

Maybe their followup should be a cover/version of EMI about the blight that is record companies in all of this…

Thanks to Bob Levingbird for tipping me off about this.

The embedding wars continue…and it seems to me that the industry as it scrabbles for money is just shooting itself in the horse when the foot has bolted (did I get that right? ) – it is as Damien from OK GO writes:

we’ve got this ridiculous situation where the machinery of the old system is frantically trying to contort and reshape and rewire itself to run without actually selling music. It’s like a car trying to figure out how to run without gas, or a fish trying to learn to breath air.

Damien was describing their bands battle over license/country and embed (as in when you copy the code and put videos into your own webpage/profile/blog) restricted videos, realising that this is counter-productive and annoys fans.

Apparently this is all to do with advertising – the Ad revenue isn’t shared for embedded ads (although annoyingly YouTube STILL shows the ads an embedded videos – what IS with that?) as advertisings don’t like the idea of embedded videos possibly ‘hurting’ their brand by being embedded on any old site (say, a porn site or site of a rival or critical party…yes advertisers get with the 21st century, and the fact of mass comment and lack of control, but as we know like with music marketers they don’t have a clue(train) as yet)…

So when you have bands criticising their paymasters (in this case our old friends EMI) or like with Amanda Palmer criticising Warners for pulling her videos (and then created the wonderful song above ‘Please Drop Me’ to the tune of Moon River – asking fans to upload it to YouTube as a response to Warners), then you know something is very wrong in the state of DigiMark.

And I think this is counterproductive – as Damien and Amanda realise such freedom over their videos help build their career – to clamp down on embedding or sharing or streaming or posting low-quality MP3s is actually to stop the massive free-promotional tool that is the internet. It’s far worse when someone doesn’t actually give a shit and want to listen/post/play/embed your videos and music, believe me. To have their attention is a luxury – don’t waste it, or turn it off by silly restrictions – to lose that possibly a lifetime of attention for the sake of a few cents is really to cut your face off to spite your nose (again? did I do that right?) (thanks to chronicpaint for the link)