On Napster Nuggets, Red Cows, and a Snowy Day

by Michael C. Berch

We all followed one of the great Internet stories of the last couple of years: the miraculous rise, and even more precipitous fall, of Napster, the music-sharing service that introduced millions of people to peer-to-peer file trading, and a return to the concept that the Internet might be more than a passive entertainment system owned by the media conglomerates.

To be sure, what was on offer at Napster was not typical cottage-industry produce; rather, it was the lovingly-tended, digitized editions of many millions of music collections. And those collections were made up of, for the most part, commercial releases of popular artists. The legal fig-leaf devised by Napster, Inc., was that those online copies were made available for the convenience of people who had already purchased a copy of the commercial release, and wanted to augment their collection with a portable, digital copy. But without any means to verify this, up went the Jolly Roger and Napster took off like a rocket, becoming the fourth-most popular site on the Internet (behind only AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft). The recording industry struck back mightily in the courts, and eventually, down went the Jolly Roger, and down went Napster, to be left circling the drain with hundreds of other failed dot-coms.

That much is the condensed Napster story, oft-repeated in the last year as a cautionary tale with everything from easy venture capital to the evils of copyright infringement to the lack of any sort of revenue plan as the villain. But peer-to-peer file sharing is not only not dead, it's now more firmly in the control of its users, independent of both media companies and self-designated intermediaries like Napster. What file sharing needed was a good open standard that needed no central database of users, and it found it in Gnutella, a network designed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper. With Gnutella all you need is a client program-a large number are available-and an Internet connection. The client discovers other Gnutella hosts by a digital form of word-of-mouth, passing connection details and the contents of file searches from computer to computer in an informal, decentralized network.

Thus: nobody to sue, nobody to block, and-given that Internet Service Providers are protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act-probably nobody even to threaten. There will undoubtedly be other battles and changes in the landscape, but there seems to be no large-scale threat to mass file sharing, which has extended from music to images, video, and software.

Which leads to the more interesting question: if not simply copies of the latest from Madonna, n'Sync, and Destiny's Child, what changes hands in the great Autonomous Zone of file trading?

The next layer seems to be a sort of penumbra of the commercial recording industry-a mélange of unofficial material from its artists: unreleased live recordings, digitized bootlegs, tapes from TV appearances, interviews, old demos, radio in-studio performances, club remix tapes, outtakes, and the like. This stuff has always existed as sort of a debris cloud around most popular artists, but the trading nets make old-style bootleg distribution obsolete. Getting a copy of your favorite band's latest club appearance can now be an easy fingertip-and-mouse task rather than trading favors with the local tapehead.

After that, of course, there's an awful lot of porn.

It has been argued that porn, in forms of variously increasing quality, has been the driving force behind many of the technical advancements in personal computing and on the Internet. Why buy a bigger disk drive? To store dirty pictures. A faster modem? To download dirty pictures faster. A high-quality graphics card and fancy monitor? To view those dirty pictures, in the privacy of your home, office, or school, at suitably life-like color and resolution. And then came cable modems, DSL, 40,000 sexually-oriented commercial Web sites, and, of course Gnutella and its peers.

So the coin of the realm in 1990 -- a grainy B&W or color photo scanned from Penthouse and rendered at 640x480 -- has given way to that of 2001: entire porn films like Buttman's European Vacation, Volume 7, ripped from DVD, decoded, recompressed with DivX (a scheme favored by video pirates and named in "honor" of a failed encrypted-DVD system flogged by some entertainment mass marketers in the late 1990s), and offered up on Gnutella free to all comers. All comers, of course, who have a broadband Internet connection and enough disk space to store a film library at about 120 megabytes a title.

And those grainy photos of 1990 have now come into sharp focus, produced by multi-megapixel digital cameras and floated on Web sites, the trading nets, and, of course, the oldest standby-Usenet newsgroups. The last of these provides fodder for another mercantile layer of consumer assistance: for under $10/month, one may subscribe to a service which extracts images from the newsgroups and assembles them in an easy-to-select format on a Web site. Some quick calculations show that even ignoring the Web and trading nets, there is enough porn on the newsgroups alone such that one could download images and video 24/7 on a fast connection and still not make a sizeable dent in the total.

After removing the twin 600-ton gorillas of porn and popular music from the file trading equation, what is left? Ah. That's when we get down to the real stuff. This is analogous to what you find poking around a particularly juicy garage sale-except that this garage sale is like Paris' Clignancourt flea market on steroids, and millions of people each day dump full baskets of new stuff into the mix.

The most common objects are simply normal PC system files and parts of applications that made their way into the file trading nets, mostly commonly by users who answered "yes" to the configuration question, "Search the file system for other files of these types to share?" which is posed by several of the file trading clients. What this produces, tediously, are thousands of copies of graphics widgets (rightarrow.gif, purple_bkg.jpg) from various versions of Windows, MacOS, UNIX, and various applications, as well as snippets of sounds with names like grizzlybear.wav, samantha_screams.aiff, or gameover.raw. Sadly, despite the colorful titles, these are typically just sound bites from video games: momentarily satisfying, but not even something you would pay a quarter for from the church rummage bin.

But then, when all else is removed, are the true gems of this piece. Most personal computers now have at least rudimentary sound recording capability. Most users, however, don't really have much of lasting importance to record; this is neither the first nor the last time that the technology outstrips the need for it. So the microphones are plugged in and tested, and then the fun begins. Songs half-sung, ambient noise, fragments of conversations, jingles, imitations, and the occasional original composition.

Lurking under file names like default.wav, Untitled, and Mic In, these fragments unlock a world of anonymous vocals that run from uncanny chants to unexpectedly soulful singing-a catalogue of the weird and the not-quite-comprehensible. The best-known collector of these nuggets is Mark Gunderson, whose Web site Evolution Control (www.evolution-control.com) offers a selection of "Napster Nuggets" partially as cultural analysis, and partially, well, just for fun.

So is it a surprise that these fragments would make their way back into popular music itself?

Now that the equivalent of a well-stocked early 1990s recording studio can be found on a decent multimedia PC with some pro-quality mixing software and synthesizer inputs, sampling and modeling are no farther away that your Internet connection. Forget the turntables, the tape loops, and the 72-track Tascam-pro recording is within the reach of every musician with a good grasp of computers and a corner to store some gear.

One such musician is Maggie Osterberg, who started out as a pure instrumental guitarist and branched out into electronica, mixing hand-recorded vocals with ambient sound, synth inputs, prepared patches, and a wide spectrum of altered guitar effects. Osterberg ran head-on into the Napster Nuggets, and the result is an enigmatic set of songs on two short CDs: "Red Cow in Heaven", "Kingz of Rap", and "Day of Snow/Snowy Day".

This work straddles the never-well-defined line between pop music and avant-garde music: to be sure, the conventional rhythms of hip-hop, trip-hop, and drum-and-bass all there, but they play second fiddle (so to speak) to the interplay of Osterberg's background effects and the foreground vocals teased out of the Napster Nugget fragments.

"Red Cow in Heaven" features a vocal track attributed to "Rappaz in Diapaz" on the Evolution Control site. So who are the Rappaz in Diapaz? We don't know. Perhaps no one knows. Given the nature of the recording and sharing process, it's quite possible that the Rappaz themselves don't know. Nor is it clear exactly what is being sung, or why. Yet the vocal is a soulful, haunting counterpoint to Osterberg's playing and the synthetic percussion tracks.

On "Kingz of Rap", the same vocalists jibe and tease in front of a guitar's drone and a full rhythm background. It's as if the Rappaz called into existence an entire hip-hop ensemble for themselves-a collaboration spanning time.

"Day of Snow/Snowy Day" repurposes a simple utterance into the vocal driving two opposed themes: a cheerful guitar-rock danceaway, and a darker organ piece that emphasizes the oddity of the recorded vocal. Sometimes a snowy day is a simple joy; sometimes it's an excuse to stay home and get into trouble.

The genius of the pieces are that unlike other displays of found art, these fragments are not presented for their irony value or as cultural criticism-instead, they're employed as musical elements on their own terms: something to write a guitar theme over, or something to process (like "Snowy Day's "Brrrr...!") until it becomes almost a single musical note that can be used to create its own rhythmic phrase.

Of course, the same technique works just as well with hand-recorded vocal lines that don't come from Napster Nuggets, as on "Scrutinize" and "Gorilla Baby Birthday Blues". Instead, Osterberg mined her own collection of various digital fragments and combined them with multiple guitar, synth, and rhythm tracks to create a dance-ish, pop-ish pair of songs.

Unlike the busted dot-com sector, the file trading nets grow daily, which means that for nugget collectors, there is an almost unlimited source of raw material. And Christmas 2001 promises another generation of new multimedia PC owners who will plug in that microphone, configure a file-trading client, and replenish the mother lode yet again.

Until then, where can you find Maggie Osterberg's songs? On the Gnutella network, of course (and on CD directly from the artist's Mediawench Productions in San Francisco). 

Maggie Osterberg's music is online at http://www.mediawench.com/music/maggmusic.html.
Information about the Gnutella Network is available at http://www.gnutella.com.
Evolution Control can be found at http://www.evolution-control.com .

Michael C. Berch (mcb@postmodern.com) is a San Francisco writer.