Rebakery

Rebakery is an ongoing recursive remix project and a space for derivative (and collaborative) work. It is the warm topsoil where musical forms are de-composed and churned and turned into fodder for the new.

'Mix' and 'remix' here are used carelessly as shorthands for any piece of music which takes other musical output as a starting point—all that samples, covers, cites, dubs, rebops, steals or develops. The patterns and abstractions linking a derivative work to its source are the stuff of Rebakery.

Each mix may be a continuation of, an homage to, or an attack on the previous one.

“…It's the norm for remixers to operate with an almost contemptuous disregard for the material they are given; in turn, their clients give the remixers license to deface and dismember.”

—Simon Reynolds, Generation Ecstacy

A derivative work is a special creative exercise with one sole constraint—that of reaction. It is a dialog with a document, a dance with the dead.

It may be grown organically from an extracted germ, or it may be a slavish manual reproduction.

That germ may be a concrete sample, rhythmic tattoo, melody or harmonic motif, to be rethreaded with new counterpoints or textures, wrapped in new coats or draped across new spaces.

Or that germ may be developed—in character, inwardly, explored at a finer granularity and permutated over time.

The repurposed elements may be concealed with musical legerdemain, or left out in the bald open of the mix—or they may be conspicuous only in their absence.

The stolen elements may be flatteringly re-presented or they may be parodied and ridiculed as effigies.

The reconstitution may be artisanal or it may be mechanical.

“What is the difference between a stolen coat and a coat that is made from a stolen cow?”

—Louis Andriessen & Elmer Schönberger, The Apollonian Clockwork