Musical Upcycling
| Topics: |  Upcycled Art |
I spent a good part of the weekend upcycling some old vinyl records into fresh new beats with the help of my friend DJ Flex Unger. Or rather he did all of that, while I sat back and watched and reflected on trash and art.
It was fun to take the dusty souvenirs I had picked up at the Jakarta antique market and turn them into something new and different, but still reflective of the original. And, I got to keep the records. The best part about upcycling music is that you can do it all electronically, preserving the original as opposed to other kinds of upcyling that fundamentally change the form of what you started out with. Now I have a catchy new beat to listen to AND the funky records.
Of course, upcycling older sounds into newer ones is nothing new. It's a fundamental part of music that has existed since the beginning of time. But these days we have new terms to understand this process. Terms like sampling, upcyling and copywrite infringement. Malcolm Gladwell covered a lot of these themes in "Something Borrowed," a 2004 article he wrote for the New Yorker after someone more than upcycled his own work.
I'd love to hear others' thoughts on the topic. And on the beat.
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Posted by Aerin Dunford on June 3, 2009 8:24 pm
This is really cool, Leila, I haven't yet considered the act of creating new beats out of old ones as upcycling. I also didn't know that the term was used in this circle.
This is what I love about a concept like upcycling . . . it stretches beyond the limits of one's imagination. I am super interested in other ways of applying concepts like "Zero Waste" or upcycling to areas of our lives that we might not have considered in the past. Like, what would it be like to live a Zero Waste lifestyle in terms of our time and our energy? I'm sure it would be different for each of us, but I'm interested in experimenting with this idea in my own life. How would I experience the world if I didn't "waste" my time? I think it would probably make me feel much more resilient and self-sustained. Anyway . . . that's a tangent. Thanks for the introduction to the new use of the term and I can't wait to check out some of the links, like the Gladwell article!
Posted by Leila Darabi on June 4, 2009 1:00 am
Hey, Aerin, I don't know if other people use the term upcycling to describe sampling and remixing, but upcycling is an old concept that applies retroactively to some pretty old practices. And really, when it comes down to it, a hip hop song is not so different from a rag rug. I like your idea of a zero waste life, though I don't know if it's achievable. At least not for me, wasting time is what I do best. And in the end, resting my brain during wasted moments often leads to bursts of creativity.
Posted by Aerin Dunford on June 4, 2009 12:47 pm
Yeah, Leila, I kind of wondered about using the term "wasting time" because it has a lot of funky connotations (especially in a Western context). I guess I'd be interested in re-defining what it means to live a zero waste life, in relationship to time and energy. I mean what you're saying here about "resing your brain" and how it leads to bursts of creativity would, to me, seem like a true zero waste approach! It's more about knowing when to be active, when to rest, when to space out, how to balance things . . . like nature, you know. So when I'm talking about not wasting time, it's more in terms of finding the way in our life that we can be most resilient and sustainable as human beings. This might mean spending a lot of time doing absolutely nothing, or doing things that we, in the West consider "non-productive," which could, in turn, lead to even more ability to be creative, generative and productive, but for the long haul. It would be like eliminating any concept of "burn out!" So I think a lot of times it's about redifining some of the terms we use.