Some Assembly Required deconstructs

By Andrew Flanagan Mon., Jan. 24 2011 at 12:33 PM

Categories: Music News, Radio

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The weekly college radio show Some Assembly Required has been quietly peeling away at their broad mandate ("

the creative reuse of fragments of recorded sound")

since 1999, interviewing dozens of keystone artists, approaching the artistic angles of copyright and appropriation in the midst of "the content war," and turning its fair share of clueless kids onto Negativland (ahem).

After 12 years, Some Assembly Required has signed off with their 262nd episode. (Someone really should tell them to move their show archive off Blogspot and out of a DMCA request's reach...)

The show put together a compilation of :50 collages by over 49 artists from all over the world, titled 50/50. The record serves as a goodbye, an illustration of Some Assembly Required's breadth, and a testament of the due respect host Jon Nelson has amassed. You can learn more about that here. Here's professors of circuit-bending Beatrix*Jar's submission to the comp, "Let's Make Some Sounds":

And here's a selection of boldface interviews, with shows to match, from throughout Some Assembly's run. A full interview archive can be found here.

Episode #85, Christian Marclay

Episode #90, Mark Hosler

Episode #238, Don Joyce

Episode #30, Lloyd Dunn and John Heck

Episode #122, Freddy Fresh

Episode #140, Girl Talk

Episode #202, DJ Spooky

Episode #221, DJ Qbert

You can go here for an MP3 of the final episode of Some Assembly Required, #262.

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