A video with clips from the proof-of-concept per­for­mance, as well as inter­views with com­poser Aaron Ger­vais and singer Gemira McClary.

Composer Aaron Gervais

June 2008: Com­poser Aaron Ger­vais begins putting together Recy­cled 80s Live, com­bin­ing split-second frag­ments of mul­ti­ple tunes, trans­form­ing them, rear­rang­ing them, expand­ing, con­tract­ing, and recom­pos­ing.

Novem­ber 2008: Aaron and a group of musi­cians led by singer Gemira McClary get together to rehearse inten­sively and pre­pare a proof-of-concept per­for­mance—a trial run to see how a live mash-up really works—at the Banff Centre in the Cana­dian Rockies.

December 2008: The ini­tial con­cert is a hit—the Recy­cled 80s Live Band plays to a full house and an impromptu ‘80s dance party breaks out after the show.

2009: Aaron is making some minor revi­sions, after which the band will rehearse some more and take the show on the road. A West Coast tour from Van­cou­ver to San Diego is in the plan­ning stages, for mid to late 2010.

Recy­cled 80s Live is a col­lage of small frag­ments of ‘80s pop songs, recom­posed and recon­tex­tu­al­ized into a new, larger work. I chose this approach because artists have always bor­rowed mate­r­ial from one another, but copy­right is increas­ingly being abused to pre­vent bor­row­ing. This sit­u­a­tion is a threat to cul­ture and cre­ativ­ity in gen­eral and it deserves to receive atten­tion.

Copy­right has always had two roles, to pro­tect the rights of the cre­ator, but more broadly, to encour­age cre­ativ­ity. With­out copy­right, artists would never be prop­erly rewarded for their work and art would not get made. But with­out fair deal­ing pro­vi­sions (or fair use in the U.S.), copy­right law stran­gles cre­ativ­ity by making art­works inaccessible.

Over the past 100 years, cor­po­rate inter­ests have increas­ingly tried to restrict or remove fair deal­ing from copy­right. Copy­right in 1900 was only 14 years long and had to be offi­cially requested. This meant that artists at the time could draw on a huge store of rel­a­tively fresh mate­r­ial in their work, lead­ing to the explo­sion of cre­ativ­ity that marked the birth of Hol­ly­wood, the avant-garde, jazz, and more. Now copy­right is auto­matic, can last over 150 years, and legit­i­mate works that use fair deal­ing are fre­quently attacked in court by cor­po­rate inter­ests. This trend has only accel­er­ated with the rise of dig­i­tal music tech­nol­ogy and file sharing.

For this reason, Recy­cled 80s Live draws entirely from mate­r­ial still under copy­right, with­out per­mis­sion. This can be done under fair deal­ing as long as the new work cre­ates new artis­tic value and does not take away from the market for the orig­i­nals. I designed Recy­cled 80s Live to respect these bound­aries, work­ing within the tra­di­tion of mash-up artists such as John Oswald or Girl Talk, but with live musi­cians. My mes­sage, to adapt an old adage, is that your right to swing your copy­right ends where my music begins.

This project would not have gotten off the ground with­out the gen­er­ous sup­port of the Alberta Foun­da­tion for the Arts and the Banff Centre.