Some Assembly Required
Encyclopedia
Sound collage
In music, montage or sound collage is a technique where sound objects or compositions, including songs, are created from collage, also known as montage, the use of portions of previous recordings or scores...
radio program in the United States, produced in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Minnesota
Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...
. It is the first radio show known to focus exclusively on works of sample based music, and appropriation in audio art. The nationally syndicated program features work by artists from a variety of genres, including plunderphonics
Plunderphonics
Plunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition...
, hip hop turntablism
Turntablism
Turntablism is the art of manipulating sounds and creating music using phonograph turntables and a DJ mixer.The word 'turntablist' was coined in 1995 by DJ Babu to describe the difference between a DJ who just plays records, and one who performs by touching and moving the records, stylus and mixer...
, musique concrète
Musique concrète
Musique concrète is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sounds derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical"...
, noise, bastard pop, sound art and more. The program celebrated its tenth anniversary on January 27, 2009.
Some Assembly Required has featured interviews with a number of influential sound collage artists including The Bran Flakes
The Bran Flakes
The Bran Flakes are a sound collage pop group with members in the United States and Canada who specialize in creating music from pre-existing sources...
, Emergency Broadcast Network, The Evolution Control Committee
The Evolution Control Committee
The Evolution Control Committee is an experimental music band based in Columbus, Ohio. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson in Columbus, in 1987. It typically uses uncleared and illegal samples from various sources as a form of protest against copyright law...
, Omer Fast, DJ Food
DJ Food
Originally produced by Coldcut on the Ninja Tune independent record label, the DJ Food project started in 1990 on the premise of providing metaphorical "food for DJs". DJ Food released the Jazz Brakes series, with Jazz Brakes Volume 3 being the most successful...
, The Freelance Hellraiser
The Freelance Hellraiser
Roy Kerr, aka The Freelance Hellraiser, is one of the creators of the UK bootleg scene.He gained fame with a mash-up called "A Stroke of Genius", which combined an instrumental edit of The Strokes' track "Hard To Explain" with Christina Aguilera's pop hit "Genie in a Bottle"...
, Girl Talk
Girl Talk (musician)
Gregg Michael Gillis , better known by his stage name Girl Talk, is an American musician specializing in mashups and digital sampling. Gillis has released five LPs on the record label Illegal Art and EPs on 333 and 12 Apostles....
, Go Home Productions
Go Home Productions
Go Home Productions is the alter ego of Mark Vidler, a producer/remixer/DJ based in Watford, Hertfordshire, England...
, Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a Swiss-American visual artist and composer.Marclay's work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film...
, Negativland
Negativland
Negativland is an experimental music and sound collage band which originated in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s. They took their name from a Neu! song, while their record label is named after another Neu! song...
, John Oswald
John Oswald (composer)
John Oswald is a Canadian composer, saxophonist, media artist and dancer. His best known project is Plunderphonics, the practice of making new music out of previously existing recordings .-Philosophy:Oswald coined the term "plunderphonics" to describe his craft in a paper called which he...
, People Like Us
People Like Us (musician)
People Like Us is the stage name of London DJ multimedia artist Vicki Bennett. She has released a number of albums featuring collages of music and sound since 1992. In recent years, she has performed at a number of modern art galleries, festivals and universities.-Musical career:Since 1991 Vicki...
, DJ Qbert, DJ Spooky
DJ Spooky
Paul D. Miller , known by his stage name DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a Washington DC-born electronic and experimental hip hop musician whose work is often called by critics or his fans as "illbient" or "trip hop". He is a turntablist, a producer, a philosopher, and an author...
, Steinski
Double Dee and Steinski
Double Dee and Steinski was a duo of hip hop producers, composed of Doug "Double Dee" DiFranco and Steven "Steinski" Stein. They achieved notoriety in the early 1980s for a series of underground hip-hop sample-based collages known as the "Lessons"....
, The Tape-beatles
The Tape-beatles
The Tape-beatles are a multi-media group that formed in Iowa City in December 1986. Its members have included Lloyd Dunn, John Heck, Ralph Johnson, Paul Neff, and Linda Morgan Brown...
, Wayne Butane and many more, since 1999.
The program began as a streaming online radio show in 1999, at the University of Minnesota
University of Minnesota
The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...
's college radio station (KUOM
KUOM
KUOM, known as "770 Radio K", "Real College Radio" is a college radio station operated by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Likely the oldest station in the state, Radio K broadcasts an eclectic mix of music from its transmitters—a variety that has been praised by radio critics...
), and quickly became a feature on the station's broadcast schedule. The radio program now airs on dozens of college, community and public radio stations across the United States and Canada, and can be heard online via its weekly podcast. Some Assembly Required is hosted by Jon Nelson
Jon Nelson
Jon Nelson is a mashup artist and a radio show host for Some Assembly Required. "Jon Nelson, mashes music and found sound — from old movies, laugh tracks, the news — to make what he calls the audio dreamscape of the media age." Jon Nelson started Some Assembly Required in 1999 and has been...
and produced at Post Consumer Productions.
Reviews and Articles
- The Art of Mashups By Tom Asbrook, On Point, February 5, 2009
- Jon Nelson of Escape Mechanism by Katya Tylevich A.V. Club Twin Cities, January 28, 2009
- Some Assembly Required: Mash-Up Pioneer Dreams in Soundbites By Elizabeth Held, Wired Magazine December 22, 2008