a collaborative dj mix and lecture series addressing recombinant culture, intellectual property, and hurricane katrina through the medium of frankenstein beats. produced by the earl of bandwidth and beastmaster romance. all tracks are available in mp3 format below, or as a single zip file at the bottom of the page.
 
  1. farewell intro
  2. a new history for you and for us
  3. 123456789
  4. downhill bottle
  5. whole buncha trouble
  6. saboteur saboteur saboteur
  7. handsome boy bottling school
  8. post-production of speech (sometimes behaves so strangely)
  9. academy flight song
  10. hard hitta interlude
  11. blackboard dub (rock for teacher)
  12. message in a bottle of liquid magic
  13. situations like this
  14. hot ass bus
  15. get into the music
  16. debussy vs. metroid
  17. the future of dub
  18. and now into the final hours of this great

BMR * EOB

 19. over apart
20. goblin bottles battle disaster
21. dirty little home
22. soft spitta interlude
23. spring fever
24. screen dreams
25. nothing new
 

THE FAREWELL ESTATE [complete album in zip file]<<

The Farewell Estate is a free album produced in expression of the ever-evolving aesthetic and political ideals of Recombinant Human Dragon. These principles include, but are not limited to: the inherently public and participatory nature of cultural production, the need for an active and radical de-commodification of popular culture, and rejecting the necessity of expertise for creating culture. While the album is broken up into 25 individual tracks, these divisions don’t necessarily indicate the beginning or ending of individual songs. The Farewell Estate can be taken as a whole or divided into any number of pieces (which could then be recombined in various ways). It is simultaneously a musical album, a political and cultural argument, a challenge to familiar notions of authorship, and a testing ground for the breakdown of the song as a musical form. We affirm the ongoing process of creation as much as our product. It is not a concept album, but rather explores the concept of the album. So the experience of listening to it can be more like tuning in to a radio program, surfing the dial, or playing a book on tape, than it is like listening to a traditional full-length album. With sound clips borrowed from movies, news broadcasts, books on tape, recordings of lectures, interviews, spoken word performances, etc., the estate is built of actual pieces of sound history drawn from ever-expanding online archives. It can be filed under both fact and fiction, history and poetry. As one voice says in the final track: “referring to things around them, referring to the elements of culture that, as you said, are pushed upon, forced upon all of us, and saying ‘look, I’m going to make sense of the language that I’m forced to deal with in this culture‘ is a comment on the condition of being in the United States in the last twenty years.” But this process of referring to pieces of one’s own culture, deconstructing and reconstructing the cultural materials that are available at hand, is an essential feature of the human experience, and a very timely comment on cultures all over the world today, not only the United States. The Farewell Estate is also a partial documentation of seven years of musical, artistic, and political collaboration between the Earl of Bandwidth and Beastmaster Romance. Aside from innumerable samples, it includes pieces of live recordings and original compositions produced between 2000 and 2007 in locations including Oberlin, Ohio; Brooklyn, New York; Ann Arbor, Michigan and Paris, France. As is always the case with the works of Recombinant Human Dragon, the album is available for free in its entirety. We welcome the incorporation of these materials into any and all future artistic works, and we hope that these future works are produced and distributed with the same conviction that cultural production and consumption should be non-proprietary, cooperative and collaborative, community-driven, and open-source. >>RHD HOME