A Happy New Year present from Eric Kleptone

Yes, that’s right, a new Kleptones album was made available yesterday as a New Year’s present for us all. I’ve been a fan since A Night At The Hip-Hopera (and have mentioned The Kleptones several times here over the years) so you can imagine that this is very welcome news to me.

Having listened to the new double(!!) album, Uptime/Downtime, a couple of times now–I’ve been playing it a bit obsessively tonight–I think it may actually have unseated HipHopera as the new reigning champion.

Go get it, it’s free and it’s awesome. (And if you haven’t already, get the back catalogue as well).

Oh, and if you like to play “spot the sample”, you might also want to look at the Wikipedia page for the new album which already (power of crowd-sourcing, etc) has a pretty significant sample list in place.

For form’s sake allow me to make explicit the should-be-obvious note here about copyright / creative remixing / fair use: What’s been produced here is an album that’s objectivelyAs my friend Greg Clark used to say “90% of music is subjective, 5% of it is just shit, and 5% is just great–and if you don’t recognize that 5%, you’re just wrong.” better than 99% of what was commercially released in 2009. This is proof that our cultural commons can be enriched by the production of new works that draw on pre-existing works to create something new–and thus is a strong argument for returning works to the commons, so they can be used in this kind of production of new works, and a strong argument against “copyright as infinite intellectual property”. My position on this hasn’t changed in any significant way since “the letter U and the numeral 2”Jesus, that was 18 years ago–well, 19 I guess if it’s really 2010. I am an old man., but it’s always nice to have things like this that so clearly prove the proposition.

(Aside for Nathan G: If you kept reading the blog, this post is especially for you.)