During my reading of Lessig’s Remix (a fantastic read), I thought it would be nice to take a moment about an interesting little musical duo called The Books. They’ve recorded several albums that typically combine electronically-manipulated guitar, cello/violin, and bass with obscure, quirky “found sound”. My guess is that no one’s getting on their case about the sound they use; I think most of it comes from such obscure sources (academic lectures, home videos, random street recordings) that the originators of the recordings probably don’t have any idea that their audio is being used; nor would they care if they did know. So this doesn’t exactly pertain to Lessig’s discussion of copyright law, but I find their music fascinating for they way they create a touching semblance of “real life” from collages of bizarre, scattershot audio. Sometimes these bits are funny and a little bit shocking, as in the case of the clip that begins their song “Motherless Bastard”. This byte was allegedly captured accidentally by one of the musicians as he was trying to record ambient sounds of crowds and water at an aquarium. What he got instead was this exchange (not staged) between a father and his child (gender unclear):
Child: Mommy, Daddy! Mommy, Daddy. Mom? Dad?
Father: You have no mother or father.
Child: Yeah I do!
Father: No, they left. They went somewhere else.
Child: No, they didn’t, you are! I do!
Father [seems to be on the verge of laughter]: I’m not, I don’t know you.
Child [downtrodden]: Dad…
Father: Don’t touch me, don’t call me that in public. [end of clip; music begins]
While this is certainly not normal fatherly behavior, and you could look at it as incredibly cruel, the sense I get is of an exasperated father acting a bit bizarre after a long day. But regardless, I get this feeling from knowing that it’s just something that happened, recorded completely accidentally, and the worked into the fabric of this album (called Thought for Food, by the way. Their second release is called The Lemon of Pink).
I think the feeling I get from these bits of found content, a feeling that is hard to pin down but certainly strong, is best captured when watching these two fantastic videos for their songs “Take Time” and “Classy Penguin”. They are also composed entirely (or almost) of found footage. “Classy Penguin” consists mostly of family home videos of kids at various stages of childhood, and towards the end they grow so brief and abstract (a blurry shot of icicles hanging off the roof; a closeup of a microwave’s LCD clock) that on their own, they would be meaningless. But woven into this tapestry of random snippets from the lives of hundreds of families, they take on an astounding poignancy and truth–they even feel as if they could have come right out of my own childhood. Do watch the videos, linked below: