Reason number 3,174 why I love Germany: it’s the one nation that has both arcane governmental procedures and the avant-garde musicians to turn them into protest art — with the chops in Pure Data (Max’s open source cousin) to squeeze 70,000+ samples into a tiny space.
Song registration requires citing each sample? No problem — unless you’re an overzealous Pd user. Meet Johannes Kreidler and his work “Product Placement”
product placements (2008)
music piece / performance (“music theater”)
70,200 samples in 33 seconds: nightmare for GERMAN RIAA
If you want to register a song at GEMA (RIAA, ASCAP of Germany) you have to fill in a form for each sample you use, even the tiniest bit. On 12 Sept 08, German Avantgarde musician Johannes Kreidler will —as a live performance event—register a short musical work that contains 70,200 quotations with GEMA using 70,200 forms.
Here he is, causing hilarity with a phone operator for GEMA:
And here’s the actual piece, which sounds as awful (in a good, glitchy way) as you’d expect listening to 70,000 records at once might sound.
I’m not entirely sure what this proves, but now you can say you heard it.
And if this doesn’t mean sampling has jumped the shark, nothing does.
Product Placements Piece Page: English | German