2010-11-13

the sound of silence

A mysterious incident occurred with Hazard Records at the Internet Archive:

Hazard: "In august 2008, Hazard Records released the album "This Is The End, Beautiful Friend", by File Under Toner and uploaded it to the Internet Archive. It was made by recording run-out grooves (supposedly silent) of thirty-six selected records and manipulating them both by analogue and digital means. The audible result is a series of thirty-six short tracks of manipulated surface noise.

This record poses a couple of questions: "do the silent run-out grooves have copyrights?" and "in case they have, who do they belong to?". For this reason, it uses records from artists who have been involved in copyright infringement cases before. It used run-out grooves of records by Abba, Michael Jackson and James Brown, all of them known for suing artists who had used fragment of their works out of context.

At the end of September 2010, the album "This Is The End, Beautiful Friend", by File Under Toner, was "made unavailable" by the Internet Archive due to "issues with the item's content".

So, we have un-censored the record (made it available again) in October 2010. Just to (try to) keep things calm, we have removed (part of) the liner notes and replaced them by the open letter we wrote to the Internet Archive. The original liner notes can still be found in a text file (hopefully invisible for automatic filters). We hope that this is a good solution for this situation. However, it might be a good idea to download the record quickly, just in case."

Link full article: https://www.ankitoner.com/fut/theend_en.htm
Link release: https://www.archive.org/details/hr061
Link rerelease: https://www.archive.org/details/hr061b/