The Droplift Project: Thirty Masterworks of Audio Collage, Media Appropriation, and Other Illegal Tricks
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“The recording industry pursues a legal stranglehold on work which is essentially done by marginal artists and crackpots,” says Tim Maloney, aka Naked Rabbit, a Los Angeles collagist and the person responsible for coordinating the Droplift Project. “There is a one-way communication, in which we are all overloaded with stimulus from the corporate owners of culture but are unable to talk back to it in any meaningful way. It’s not just frustrating for those who want to talk back at it, it’s bad for our culture.”
The Droplift Project isn’t the first to utilize guerrilla distribution tactics. According to Richard Holland, one of the leaders of the project, he and his band, Institute for Sonic Ponderance, secretly placed their CDs at Tower Records, Best Buy, and the Quaker Goes Deaf. The Droplift Project has expanded the scheme; its recent self-titled release was limited to a pressing of 1,000 copies, but through droplifting, underground radio, and the project’s Web site (www.droplift.org), its music has spread across the U.S. and Europe.
A diverse collection of 29 tracks, the CD features many identifiable samples, including a gee-whiz Wally Cleaver-ism on Project Data Control’s big-beat “Blame the Media,” a funny Mr. T bit on Bonefish Jam and His Power Orchestra’s “Mr. T. Adventure Story,” and a not-so-disguised sample from the Jane’s Addiction tune “Been Caught Stealing” on Stop Children’s “To the Fullest Extent of the Law.” Satirical and ironic moments abound, though the funniest track is “Free Will” by Phineas Narco and Ronald Redball, which takes on God, sex, and talk radio. Listening to the disc is a lot like walking through a contemporary art museum: some of it is likable, some is downright awful, and a lot is just incomprehensible.
