Release date 28 July 2000 | ||
Cubicle 38 droplift blues
The Droplift Project is a compilation CD of 29 (or 30) tracks created by sound collage artists in July 2000. It was manufactured by the participants and then "droplifted" into chain music stores. This process involved having operatives sneak the CD into stores and file it in regular music racks as if it were regular product. In this way a kind of "reverse shoplifting" results in the artist's work appearing next to "legitimate" products of the dominant culture. This same process is also known as "Shopdropping" in the U.K.
Contents
Project origins
The Droplift Project began in 1998 when members of a mailing list called "Snuggles," which was organized to discuss the audio collage art of Negativland, began to trade their own collage works online. Two cassette tape compilations, "The Art/Act of Snuggling" and "Red Hand Dave" preceded the project, but these were limited edition tape trading projects not intended for wider distribution. Discussion online began to steer the group towards creating a CD of tracks, but the concept only came together when Richard Holland recommended the "Droplift" idea, which he had practiced earlier with his group "The Institute of Sonic Ponderance."
Project operation
Under the stewardship of animator and sometimes Negativland collaborator Tim Maloney, the tracks were submitted via FTP, collated, mastered, and pressed to CD. Copies were sent all over America as well as some other countries for droplifting. On July 28, 2000, a coordinated effort was made amongst participants to drop the discs in chain record stores as a kind of protest against the music industry and especially the distribution of music at that time. Only 1000 discs were manufactured, but the audio materials, CD packaging, and other materials are still available online.
Popular significance
In mid-2000, the prominence of Napster and the rise of online music was just beginning; it was rather timely for artists to attempt a dialogue about the sale and distribution of music in America. At that time there were fewer outlets to buy music (which was then almost entirely on CDs) and thus fewer outlets for experimental or avant-garde music. Furthermore, the kind of copyright panics that were to follow in the wake of Napster and the growing concerns over music "piracy" were just beginning - the Droplift artists were interested in the artist's right to reuse and cut-up products of culture, such as television, music, and other copyrighted sources, and how this cutting up produced new, transformative art from the original sources. By 2001 Napster had reorganized and Apple's iTunes Music Store had yet to debut, so the future of music and the artist's role with respect to copyrights was still very much in public debate.
Since then, the popularity of mashups and YouTube remixes have contributed to the ongoing discussion.
Further sources:
Songs
1ThunderclockTim Maloney2:34
2Cubicle 38 Droplift BluesTurntable Trainwreck2:13
3Free WillPhineas Narco and Ronald Redball2:41