Philip K Nixon

Philip K Nixon started out of a desire to see just how far I could push the idea of illegal art while making a statement about culture. I’d just discovered audacity, and mixing together random samples, creating and manipulating sound was a way to experiment with tying together knots of culture to see what effect it might have. Also, it was 2003 and it was a good deal harder to find interesting video to steal sound clips from, so it was something of an extended scavenger hunt to see if I could find and incorporate specific clips with no budget and whatever equipment I could wire together.

Right up front I’m letting you know that this is not music. Nothing exists except as a copy of itself with Philip K Nixon, there are samples which are copies of the audio I take from movies, most of which are mangled beyond recognition and layered so densely into the background that they become little more than touchstones, hopefully to allow the listener to maneuver through our mediated monoculture. This is audio sculpture, noise graffitti, and since the beginning Philip K Nixon was an attempt to create an ongoing appearance of a band, inspired by Negativland and the idea of the artists formerly known as Mondo Vanilli, but to then use that false front to inject grit into the hyperrational gears of an industry that’s now used legislation to prevent forms of artistic expression (and no I’m not talking about porn.).

When I met Mystery X, he’d been working with large databases of audio samples, innumerable charts and tables, and fistfuls of dice to randomly create audio collages. Mystery X not only understood FNORD but actually has a cat named Eris, making him the perfect dude to join in on this nutty soundscaping project.

At my urging, Mystery X took his random collaging of multimedia beyond the audio gathering and noise assemblage, putting his vast pools of dice to the task of creating videos for the various PKN tracks, and his work on the latest album is probably some of the most coherent yet sporadic work yet.

Here’s the video for 1 I be Real, directed by Mystery X:

Since the beginning, I’d conceived of Philip K Nixon as an attempt to make something that should not exist within a market-driven economy, (and since it does exist now, then perhaps I’m proving that there’s more to life than markets, perhaps.) Mainly though, I maintain that sampling is the actual instrument by which ALL artistic shit manifests, that on some level you could perceive all of culture as a continuous re-collaging of semantic artifacts, or some whacked out arthouse bullshit like that. At some point, the entity Philip K Nixon independent of either myself or Mystery X assumed the pseudonym Yellow One and infiltrated an international network of masked intelligence agents.

Signs of Violence (SumBunall mix) Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

And yet after all those accomplishments, (or perhaps in spite of them) it’s still illegal to sell these albums, thanks to the whole “sampling thing.” So I’m not now, nor have I ever intended to sell these tracks on a disc or record or some such shit. I am, however, selling myself shirts on cafepress so I can wear my own construct’s swag, and y’all can buy that shit too, though it’s all marked down so low that I don’t actually make money if you buy it (again, more of that artistic statement shit.)

Here’s the video for ORACULL, directed by me, more or less:

But ultimately here’s my point: if works of COLLAGE and ASSEMBLAGE are allowed in museums, then collaging and assembling audio samples is an art form. It’s fundamentally hyperrational to legislate against expression (and for fuck’s sake someone better point this out before we all go mad locked up inside these out-dated notions of ownership – Ed.)

I’ve placed the entire discography of Philip K Nixon into the torrents (including two .mpg, an .avi and a .wmv video as well as the album artwork,) which includes the two latest releases, Bigfoot Is Dead (5/23/07) and This Shit Fucking Works (7/7/07). The artist Ray Carney has also contributed to the art direction and image creation for Philip K Nixon, as has the independent documentary film maker Freeman, who doesn’t even know he’s on the album since he’d left for a Rainbow Gathering before I could let him know, but still his contributions on NIHOP helped make that track the centerpiece of the album. Normally I’d list everyone involved, but now I can’t even track everyone since so much of this material came serendipitously and demanded to be included.

So, that’s it then. Here’s everything Philip K Nixon has ever released