Sonic Outlaws

“Copyright infringement is your best entertainment value,” chimes Negativland, still reeling from their defeat in the notorious U2 lawsuit. Montage-meister Craig Baldwin begins with the controversial copyright-commandeering case, then surges forward to touch upon issues of fair use, parody versus piracy, and culture-jamming in general. His “sonic outlaws” have a sound investment in inventing an “electronic folk culture” built upon free foraging in the trough of aural artifacts. Those great repurposers Negativland aren't the only ones to mouth off: Baldwin mashes in testimony from John Oswald, The Tape Beatles, the Emergency Broadcast Network, and the Barbie Liberation Organization, all the while anchoring these aural activists in tactics related to Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and the Situationists. Baldwin practices what he preaches: Sonic Outlaws is itself a charged montage of movie lifts, quirky quotation, and prankster pastiche, drawn from his legendary archive of cultural loose ends. In this way, Sonic Outlaws is a ripping resistance to the escalating control over our collective sampling reservoir.

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