Korn Video:

		List Price: $24.95		Label: Other Cinema Salesrank: 62768 Released: March 29, 2005
		Our Price: $11.24
		Used Price: $11.85
		MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated) Media: DVD

Editorial Review:
Within days after the release of Negativland’s clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

Sonic Outlaws Reviews:
Frenetic and fun
2008-03-26 - 'Sonic Outlaws' is one of my very favourite documentaries, not only for its content, but also for the way it really captures the renegade spirit of the world of culture jamming.

'Sonic Outlaws' focuses on the 1990s musical practice of culture jamming, in all it's chaotic glory. In particular, director Craig Baldwin interviews the consummate mischief-makers, Negativeland, about their experiences with the music industry and copyright law. There are also interviews with Emergency Broadcast Network (EBN), John Oswald (of 'Plunderphonics' fame), Alan Korn, and Douglas Kahn, among others.

As a documentary, 'Sonic Outlaws' does not attempt to present all sides of the music copyright debate. In fact, it is generally scathing of the commercial music industry which, to the industry's discredit, has scarcely moved forward in the 13 years since the documentary was released. The questions of fair-use in sound sampling and legal debates raised by Baldwin and his subjects are, therefore, still pertinent in the present day.

As a film, it is delightfully frenzied look into the electronic folk scene; a poetic collage of the contemporary media, spliced with insightful interviews and some great footage of Negativeland and EBN's practices. My favourite scene depicts a member of Negativeland using a frequency scanner to glean and record a private phone conversation, for use in the band's music. It is a grippingly voyeuristic moment that not only shows their no-boundaries approach to sampling, but also raises some fascinating questions about spectatorship in cinema, considering that we are actually witnessing a real, intimate conversation in a hyper-realistic documentary format.

Basically, 'Sonic Outlaws' will keep you glued to the screen for its entire duration. It's funny and entertaining, and very likely to inform anyone who ventures to watch it about a subject that is just as relevant today as it was in 1995.

Pictoral Record of the Letter 2 and the Numeral U!
2007-04-01 - This little movie explores the art of "Found Sound" plagarism and re-manipulation. It portrays those who'se mission is to capture the plastic cultural icons and refashion them into new monsters to awaken people and make them think.

The acme of this art is of course, Negativland! The way they do it brings on a smile because it is so amusing! Yet your smile will transform into a smirk, and your gut-felt laugh will transform into feeling like a horse kicked you in the gut. It dawns on you: that all the commercial jingles heard throughout your life have made you into the media's obediant robot, buying thousands of $1.00 a bottle sugar-waters and smoking yourself to death for the profit of others!

But beware: If you have the guts to protest, you are a heretic to this new religion of mass consumerism. And if you have the guts to "bite back" like Negativland does, be prepared to have the powers-that-be rain lawyers on you!

Watch as Negativland battles Corporate Music and their spokesman, Casey Kasum. See my favorite Clorox Cowboy-The Weatherman-scan cellular telephone calls! His excuse: "The airwaves suppossed to be free and here it is!"

See John Oswald create "Plunderphonics" and splice together media sound bites to the delight of the members of Negativland. And witness the Barbie Liberation Front exchange the electronic voiceboxes of Barbies and G.I.Joes!

ANd especially, see how YOU have been manipulated by Corporate America.

Recombinant plagiarism as cultural critique
2006-09-04 - "When the mass media are controlled by the few, that makes media piracy a form of criticism." Craig Baldwin's subversive dada-cumentary explores the gray area that is intellectual property. It comes down to distribution. We live in a media environment of one-way corporate information bombardment, a media barrage. Capitalism plus art equals ownership, commoditization, consumption, hot and cold running culture. Some folks aren't happy with being passive consumer-receivers and instead seek to jam, subvert, slice and dice this monoculture, seeing plagiarism as an industrial process, recombining and retransmitting new memes to contaminate the corporate mainstreams. Collage, musique concrete, sampling, dada, cut-up, mash-up, xeroxing, 'zines, photomontage, Situationism, detournment, plunderphonics, culture jamming change the media flow into a two-way thing and bring the overwrought phrase "interactive media" to life. "Everyone has access to capturing devices now, audio, video, all sorts of things where you can, at home, as an individual, grab culture out of the airwaves and do what you want with it...that gives us a folk culture where things evolve by stealing from other things." Negativland, Adbusters, the Copyright Violation Squad, Emergency Broadcast Network, the Tape-Beatles, the Barbie Liberation Organization are revealed to be televisionaries, media archeologists who sift through the detritus of postmodern consumer culture in order to hold up an anthropologically strange mirror, interrupt the ceaseless flow of propaganda, and jar some sense back into our numbed and dumbed lives. Their medium is our masseur. "One of the prices of being out there in the public is being rearranged and reorganized." Rude people yank back the curtain and show us that the letter U and the numeral 2 cannot be copyrighted. "In modern terms, appropriation is often about culture jamming: capturing the corporately controlled subjects of the one-way media barrage, reorganizing them to be a comment on themselves, and spitting them back into the barrage for cultural consideration. Our very process of cultural evolution is now so straitjacketed by opportunistic claims of ownership that it amounts to censorship." If all artists borrow and the best artists steal, then what becomes of art when all ideas are proprietary? Are you pro-bono or pro-paganda? Check out this film---maybe you too will realize that a billboard is your canvas and not just their advert.

Beyond Sonic
2005-09-04 - If you found this DVD film based on any kind of artist or genre search, congratulations! Go ahead and buy it. Most of these groups are somewhat well represented in the audio world but given these are self proclaimed 'culture jammers' who are dealing with multimedia as part of their art, then the 'picture' is more complete in this presentation. The director himself is obviously 'cut' from the same subversive cloth and, without disrupting the narrative of narrative disrupted, massages the medium appropriate to the subject being discussed. Highly recommended for fans and the curious/adventurous alike.