Offnominal

Okay, everyone. Offnominal/Discrec’s first online collaborative project has now gone online. Called The Treatment Plant, it is a freeform excercise in ‘Net moderated remixing and collaboration. The original sources and the guidelines/rules are available now at The Treatment Plant homepage. Be on the lookout for Logickal’s first take on these sources, Sewage Treatment on Valentine’s Day. If you have any questions about the project or wish to submit a track for inclusion, please email sewage@offnominal.com. More discussion, background and rules follow the break….

This project has its genesis in a period of 2001-2002 (roughly around the time of the Feeleffect EP. I had generated a lot of raw materials for tracks - beats, drones, snippets of melodies, etc. As is usually the case, there was a surplus of raw material that didn’t actually end up in a finished track. In the course of clearing off the hard drive, I burned some of these scraps onto CD-R, wrote Rawer Than Sewage on the disc’s face and proceeded to lose the CD among a host of others.

Fast forward to November/December 2004, when (in the process of trying to make the abode presentable for holiday guests) I happen to run across this CD-R, and I decided that it was about time to dust it off and see what could be done with the sounds contained therein. Then I decided that it gave me the sources to use for a project that I’ve been wanting to do for some time - an online collaboration/remix project, open to anyone who wishes to participate.

Along comes January, when I finally started getting all the ducks in a row (reincoding the soruces, getting the webpage together, etc) and working a bit with the sounds myself. A week or so later, I found that I had about 15 new pieces developed using only these sources. As of today, mastering is nearly completed and I’m assembling the final running order. On February 14, Treatment Plant 1 will go online for listening and remixing.

So, what are the rules? The only rule that matters is that you create your tracks using only the material available on the webpage. Any style/genre/methodology is acceptable (although the sources may have a predisposition towards the experimental electronic side of things). You can slice, dice, fold, spindle and mutilate the original sources or any of the derivations of the sources made available on the page. All tracks should be made available with the Creative Commons Share-Alike 2.0 license to promote this cross-contamination.

I hope that we’ll be able to hear tracks containing fragments of different, disparately-styled pieces crafted into new forms. To make these explorations interesting, I’d like to suggest (but not require) that artists include details about which tracks/pieces/sounds they used to create their peice over and above the simple requirement of attribution back to the original work.

Once your tracks are complete, you can either host them offsite and send us a link to the file or email your tracks to us at the sewage@offnominal.com address. If you’re emailing the mp3s, please keep the filesize under 5mb, or email to get access to upload via FTP. Send along contact information and track attribution (as detailed as you feel).

Further plans? I’m most looking forward to meeting/communicating with the people that take up this project. I’m excited to hear other people’s work, hear what people do with my work and keep the project’s genepool active by working with other people’s pieces. It’s not a competition, although a “best-of” release and/or a grand mash-up utilizing portions of every track could be a possibility. There’s no fixed deadline for submissions at this point, because I’d like for it to continue long enough to allow the exploration of the evolutionary aspects of the project - at lease two or three rounds or permutations.

So, what are you waiting for? Go download the sources. Check back in the next week or so to get Treatment Plant 1 and whatever else comes through. Any and all updates will be posted here to the blog. Feel free to make contact if you have any questions.