The Evolution Control Committee
Encyclopedia
The Evolution Control Committee (The ECC) is an experimental music
band based in Columbus, Ohio
. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson (a.k.a. TradeMark G.) in Columbus
, in 1987. It typically uses uncleared and illegal samples
from various sources as a form of protest against copyright
law. The ECC also produces numerous audio experiments, such as the disfiguring
of compact discs in live performance, known as "CDestruction", and has produced a few video
works as well, ranging from re-edited 50's corporate
shorts to a Teddy Ruxpin
reciting the works of William S. Burroughs
. Other activities include culture jamming
.
They are one of the pioneers
of the mash-up
or bootleg, where two or more songs are mixed together into a new track. According to Neil Strauss
in the New York Times, "...many musical observers trace the official beginnings of the British bootleg scene to The Evolution Control Committee, which in 1993 mixed a Public Enemy a cappella with music by Herb Alpert." These are the now-classic "Public Enemy/Whipped Cream Mixes", with Public Enemy's inflammatory raps
, "By the Time I Get To Arizona" and "Rebel Without a Pause" overdubbed onto instrumentals by Herb Alpert
and the Tijuana Brass.
The ECC is probably best known for its song "Rocked By Rape", consisting of samples of Dan Rather
's deadpan
delivery describing various atrocities over looped riffs from AC/DC
's "Back in Black". This work brought legal threats against The ECC by CBS
, but by 2003, CBS appears to have let the issue go by. "Rocked by Rape" was nationally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered
in 2000. It was even played at a roast
for Rather, which was later broadcast on C-SPAN
.
Since 2000, Gunderson has performed his works on stage through an electronic instrument of his own invention: "The Thimbletron." It is made of a pair of gloves with ten thimbles attached at the ends of the fingers, which are then wired to a laptop computer. As the thimbles are touched together, the laptop in turn plays a different sound sample. Gunderson claims that the device uses "thimbletronium energy" and warns that "thimbletronic radiation can leak unexpectedly due to a mishap during a live performance. The audience is advised to attend Thimbletron performances at their own risk." Gunderson has also modified a bread toaster in a similar fashion, with each depression of a lever playing a sample.
The Thimbletron has been largely retired in public performances in favor of the Wheel of Mashup, in which audience members come up on stage and spin a wheel to randomly select the music and vocals to be combined. These are then mashed together in real time using the VidiMasher 3000, a large rear-projected touch screen used to control Ableton Live
. http://evolution-control.com/index.php/experiments/videos/151-video-mashup-screen-demo
Other related artists include The Bran Flakes
, Emergency Broadcast Network
, Escape Mechanism
, Negativland
, John Oswald
, People Like Us
and The Tape-beatles
.
Greg Gillis, in interview outtakes for the movie "RIP: A Remix Manifesto", admits that Evolution Control Committee was a major influence and inspiration to create the mashups for his artistic persona Girl Talk. Gillis even explains that the best description of Girl Talk's music is "Plunderphonics".
Experimental music
Experimental music refers, in the English-language literature, to a compositional tradition which arose in the mid-20th century, applied particularly in North America to music composed in such a way that its outcome is unforeseeable. Its most famous and influential exponent was John Cage...
band based in Columbus, Ohio
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...
. The ECC was founded by Mark Gunderson (a.k.a. TradeMark G.) in Columbus
Columbus, Ohio
Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...
, in 1987. It typically uses uncleared and illegal samples
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song or piece. Sampling was originally developed by experimental musicians working with musique concrète and electroacoustic music, who physically...
from various sources as a form of protest against copyright
Copyright
Copyright is a legal concept, enacted by most governments, giving the creator of an original work exclusive rights to it, usually for a limited time...
law. The ECC also produces numerous audio experiments, such as the disfiguring
Disfigurement
Disfigurement is the state of having one's appearance deeply and persistently harmed medically, as from a disease, birth defect, or wound.Disfigurement, whether caused by a benign or malignant condition, often leads to severe psychosocial problems such as negative body image; depression;...
of compact discs in live performance, known as "CDestruction", and has produced a few video
Video
Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...
works as well, ranging from re-edited 50's corporate
Corporation
A corporation is created under the laws of a state as a separate legal entity that has privileges and liabilities that are distinct from those of its members. There are many different forms of corporations, most of which are used to conduct business. Early corporations were established by charter...
shorts to a Teddy Ruxpin
Teddy Ruxpin
Teddy Ruxpin is a children's toy talking bear. The bear would move his mouth and eyes while 'reading' stories which were played on an audio tape cassette deck built into his back. It was created by Ken Forsse with later assistance by Larry Larsen and John Davies. Later versions would use a digital...
reciting the works of William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
. Other activities include culture jamming
Culture jamming
Culture jamming, coined in 1984, denotes a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. Guerrilla semiotics and night discourse are sometimes used synonymously with the term culture jamming.Culture...
.
They are one of the pioneers
Innovator
An innovator in a general sense, is a person or an organization who is one of the first to introduce into reality something better than before. That often opens up a new area for others and achieves an innovation.-History:...
of the mash-up
Mashup (music)
A mashup or bootleg is a song or composition created by blending two or more pre-recorded songs, usually by overlaying the vocal track of one song seamlessly over the instrumental track of another...
or bootleg, where two or more songs are mixed together into a new track. According to Neil Strauss
Neil Strauss
Neil Darrow Strauss , also known by the pen names Style and Chris Powles, is an American and Kittitian author, journalist and ghostwriter...
in the New York Times, "...many musical observers trace the official beginnings of the British bootleg scene to The Evolution Control Committee, which in 1993 mixed a Public Enemy a cappella with music by Herb Alpert." These are the now-classic "Public Enemy/Whipped Cream Mixes", with Public Enemy's inflammatory raps
Rapping
Rapping refers to "spoken or chanted rhyming lyrics". The art form can be broken down into different components, as in the book How to Rap where it is separated into “content”, “flow” , and “delivery”...
, "By the Time I Get To Arizona" and "Rebel Without a Pause" overdubbed onto instrumentals by Herb Alpert
Herb Alpert
Herbert "Herb" Alpert is an American musician most associated with the group variously known as Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass, Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, or TJB. He is also a recording industry executive — he is the "A" of A&M Records...
and the Tijuana Brass.
The ECC is probably best known for its song "Rocked By Rape", consisting of samples of Dan Rather
Dan Rather
Daniel Irvin "Dan" Rather, Jr. is an American journalist and the former news anchor for the CBS Evening News. He is now managing editor and anchor of the television news magazine Dan Rather Reports on the cable channel HDNet. Rather was anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years, from March 9,...
's deadpan
Deadpan
Deadpan is a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in emotion or body language, usually speaking in a casual, monotone, solemn, blunt, disgusted or matter-of-fact voice and expressing an unflappably calm, archly insincere or artificially grave demeanor...
delivery describing various atrocities over looped riffs from AC/DC
AC/DC
AC/DC are an Australian rock band, formed in 1973 by brothers Malcolm and Angus Young. Commonly classified as hard rock, they are considered pioneers of heavy metal, though they themselves have always classified their music as simply "rock and roll"...
's "Back in Black". This work brought legal threats against The ECC by CBS
CBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
, but by 2003, CBS appears to have let the issue go by. "Rocked by Rape" was nationally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered
All Things Considered
All Things Considered is the flagship news program on the American network National Public Radio. It was the first news program on NPR, and is broadcast live worldwide through several outlets...
in 2000. It was even played at a roast
Roast (comedy)
A roast is an event in which an individual is subjected to a public presentation of comedic insults, praise, outlandish true and untrue stories, and heartwarming tributes, the implication being that the roastee is able to take the jokes in good humor and not as serious criticism or insult, and...
for Rather, which was later broadcast on C-SPAN
C-SPAN
C-SPAN , an acronym for Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, is an American cable television network that offers coverage of federal government proceedings and other public affairs programming via its three television channels , one radio station and a group of websites that provide streaming...
.
The Thimbletron has been largely retired in public performances in favor of the Wheel of Mashup, in which audience members come up on stage and spin a wheel to randomly select the music and vocals to be combined. These are then mashed together in real time using the VidiMasher 3000, a large rear-projected touch screen used to control Ableton Live
Ableton Live
Ableton Live is a loop-based software music sequencer and DAW for Mac OS and Windows by Ableton. The latest major release of Live, Version 8, was released in April 2009. In contrast to many other software sequencers, Live is designed to be an instrument for live performances as well as a tool for...
. http://evolution-control.com/index.php/experiments/videos/151-video-mashup-screen-demo
Discography
- Jesu Boy of Man's Desiring (Self Release)
- Audio cassette featuring early cut-ups.
- Buddha Bleach (Self Release on Def Clam Tapes, Dec. 1990)
- Audio cassette featuring early cut-ups.
- The Last Mall (Self Release)
- Audio cassette featuring loops and crank phone calls. Packaged in a "Lazarusears" shopping bag.
- Big Wyoming (Self Release)
- Audio cassette featuring travelogue of a Gunderson family ski vacation accompanied by CasioCasiois a multinational electronic devices manufacturing company founded in 1946, with its headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Casio is best known for its electronic products, such as calculators, audio equipment, PDAs, cameras, musical instruments, and watches...
. Packaged in postcards.- Gunderphonic (Self Release, 1994 http://www.evolution-control.com/sounds/gunderphonic/index.html)
- Audio cassette inspired by John OswaldJohn 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...
's PlunderphonicsPlunderphonicsPlunderphonics 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...
. Features cut-ups, including the well known Whipped Cream mixes and two "corrected" Gulf War speeches by George H. W. Bush. The audio cassette is packaged inside of an old 8-track cassette.- Double the Phat and Still Tasteless (Released on Eerie MaterialsEerie MaterialsEerie Materials was an independent record label started in the early 1990s, first based in Richmond, Virginia and later in San Francisco, California.- History :...
)
- Double the Phat and Still Tasteless (Released on Eerie Materials
- CD featuring cut-ups and electronicaElectronicaElectronica includes a wide range of contemporary electronic music designed for a wide range of uses, including foreground listening, some forms of dancing, and background music for other activities; however, unlike electronic dance music, it is not specifically made for dancing...
, as well as absurdist humor skits and guest performances. A 5.25 inch floppy disc is slit along one side and the CD is slipped inside.- Plagiarhythm Nation(Released on Seeland RecordsSeeland RecordsSeeland Records is an independent record label created by Negativland in 1979 to release their own recordings. It is a reference to the song "Seeland" by the band Neu!, who also gave Negativland the basis for their name, Sea-Land Corporation, a freight company, and the micro-nation of Sealand,...
)
- Plagiarhythm Nation(Released on Seeland Records
- CD featuring cut-ups and electronica.
- The Whipped Cream Mixes (Released on Eerie MaterialsEerie MaterialsEerie Materials was an independent record label started in the early 1990s, first based in Richmond, Virginia and later in San Francisco, California.- History :...
/Pickled EggPickled Egg RecordsPickled Egg Records is a UK independent record label founded in Leicester in 1998 by Nigel Turner. It has dedicated itself to redressing the world’s musical balance in favour of quirky genius, bent tunefulness, noisy playfulness, jazz turmoil and inventive retro-futurism...
)
- The Whipped Cream Mixes (Released on Eerie Materials
- VinylGramophone recordA gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record , vinyl record , or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove...
45. Side A - Rebel Without A Pause. Side B - By The Time I Get to Arizona.- Unreleased Ambient Works (Self Released)
- CD featuring dark atmospheric/illbientIllbientIllbient is a term allegedly coined by DJ Olive to describe the iconoclastic music being produced by a community of artists based in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York in 1994...
works.- Rocked by Rape (Released on Eerie Materials)
- Vinyl 45.
- The Television Will Not Be Revolutionized (Self Released)
- VHSVHSThe Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....
video cassette.- Compact Discstructions (Self Released)
- A manual packaged with a random CD. The manual describes various ways to make a CD play incorrectly, and is intended ultimately to destroy the CD.
- Subliminal (Self Released)
- Cassette featuring many layered subliminal self-helpSelf-helpSelf-help, or self-improvement, is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis. There are many different self-help movements and each has its own focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases, leaders...
recordings. The website claims that side one "will increase your creativity, improve your employment, develop your ESP, help you stop smoking, and so on." While side two, being a reverse recording of the same, "will help you gain weight, get demoted, become stupid, etc." link- Weapons of Ass Destruction (Self Released)
- Full length album released online, available for download from the Sounds section of the ECC web site.
Related Artists
Mark Gunderson also records as DJ Pantshead and performs with Cheese & Pants Theater, a comedy/performance art duo consisting of a giant pair of pants and a giant Parmesan cheese shaker who pantomime to bizarrely edited vintage audio, and as DJ John Philip Suicide with Dub Assault. Past projects have included the experimental performance troupe Gaga, several ECC performances at the Columbus Avant Garage film festival, and a release with the Weird Love Makers.Other related artists include 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
Emergency Broadcast Network
Emergency Broadcast Network is the name of a multimedia performance group formed in 1991 that took its name from the Emergency Broadcast System. The founders were Rhode Island School of Design graduates Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Brian Kane . Kane left EBN in 1992...
, Escape Mechanism
Escape Mechanism
Escape Mechanism is the title of a sound collage project instigated by Minneapolis based artist Jonathan Nelson. Using fragments of audio from a variety of previously recorded sound sources, the project is an experiment in recycled media....
, 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...
and 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...
.
Greg Gillis, in interview outtakes for the movie "RIP: A Remix Manifesto", admits that Evolution Control Committee was a major influence and inspiration to create the mashups for his artistic persona Girl Talk. Gillis even explains that the best description of Girl Talk's music is "Plunderphonics".
External links
Interviews
- Radio Feature, The Some Assembly Required Interview with The Evolution Control Committee.