Compact Scippp by Buttress O'Kneel

In the year 2000, Buttress O’Kneel (with the help of her housemates at the time, fellow artists Mantis Sage, Aynat Sool, Panthera Leo, and A D MacHine) began documenting the artistic works of several robots that had achieved unprogrammed sentience. These robots were never designed to be creative, but, perhaps through simple wear and tear, commonplace quantum occurrences, or perhaps through their own dogged persistence, these robots began displaying artistic musickal tendencies, reworking and remixing standard CDs into stuttering, abstracted comments on modern humyn culture. Every night, as the humyns sat down in front of the stereo and attempted to play some musick, the robots would take over and present them with an astounding improvised glitchfest of cultural detournement and live sonic manipulation. And, thankfully for us, Buttress and her friends would quickly press “record” on the tape deck, and have captured much of those heady A.I. jam sessions for us to enjoy to this day.

These tracks have not been manipulated or edited in any way by humyn hands, but are the carefully-preserved cassette recordings of these artificial intelligences, verbatim, as they were played. Some have called this musick “AIDM” (artificial intelligence dance music), others “unplunderphonics”, while some have even said “hang on, that’s just a CD player skipping”. But no matter what the label, there are few people who would deny that these sessions may indeed have not only revolutionised our vision of commonly-available machines as robots, but also our own vision of ourselves as uniquely creative.

While the mechanical artists who created these pieces have long passed away or been put out in hard rubbish collections, we still have these recordings of their works to remember them by, and, whenever we are questioning our own artistic validity, can always use them as a shining example of what can be acheived, against all likelihood, all intentions, and all odds. Some people will always see these works as malfunctions – others will always see them as acts of revolutionary art. And truly, what is the difference?

NOTE: many of these pieces were released on the compilation "Compact Scipppp" on the Alias Frequencies netlabel in 2009, catalogue number AF038 - but most were not. Included with downloads is the artwork for that Alias Frequencies release.

“Words like "mashup" and "remix" don't really do justice to Buttress O'Kneel's method - Top 40 pop crap gets sliced, diced, and tossed into a dizzying, exciting hardcore electro stew. Compared to other djs who timidly drop a Vanilla Ice acapella over a Chemical Bros intro just to move a dance floor, O'Kneel shreds copyrights with a blood-curdling vehemence. Smash the state!”
- Music 4 Maniacs