Today the CC0lab collective is launching a remix cooperation. All 16 songs from the public domain Mixtape Vol. 1 are now on Catalog as 1:1s and today we have made the stems from all songs publicly available! You can download the stems and join the remix cooperation here.

Submit your remixes here. The CC0 crew will publish the favorite remixes on Present Materials.

If you’re hearing about CC0lab and our public domain music for the first time today, here’s a little background.

The tldr; story…

Who is CC0lab? An internet collective of 20 musicians, devs, and artists, originally formed out of the CHAOS headless band project and inside the Songcamp ecosystem. When the official CHAOS camp ended, we wanted to keep the creative momentum going and found a worthy outlet experimenting with CC0 art.

We created 16 songs + 10 artworks in a 2-week minicamp. These songs and artworks were first paired with 3D cloaks for a Fashion x Music NFT collaboration, then released as a Mixtape Vol. 1, and then as 1:1s on Catalog, and now the stems are publicly available! Oh, and best of all, the entire project is in the public domain via CC0.

The full story…

Do you remember web3 in May 2022? Sure the price of ETH used the spring break to go skydiving, but at the same time there was a much more interesting energetic shift emerging. The 77-person headless band, CHAOS, had just transitioned from Act III into Act IV. We evolved from the entropy of creation into the rebirth of preparing 21,000 music NFTs for release. During that transformation the majority of camp chaos members were left without official roles. Many of us had compressed an enormous amount of creative output into 6 weeks of making songs, organizing teams, painting paintings, designing artwork, recording podcasts and coding smart contracts. We played our roles in the immersive digital theater, but a lot of us weren’t ready to let go of that fast-paced creation. We weren’t ready to pack up and go home. We wanted to keep making things with our new internet friends! But what to do while waiting for the CHAOS debut?

Luckily, CHAOS band member Dontmesswithjuan (DMWJ) along with her friend Emma-Jane had an idea to channel that creative energy toward even more art making! Emma-Jane had a virtual CC0 fashion show planned and DMWJ suggested we gather a group of energized CHAOS band members to turn those virtual fashion pieces (dope surreal cloaks) into a massive Music NFT collaboration. Thus an experiment in collective creation inside an experiment in collective creation was born with 20 musicians, devs, and visual artists!

DMWJ: “What really matters are the human pieces we input into technology. What use we make of ever evolving tools. And we got to make this project focusing on that, on all the passion and love we have to create collectively instead of thinking about the output. ”

CC0 Music

CC0 is not a new tool, but in the hands of Web3 and collective creation, it becomes a liberating key to operate outside traditional systems. It frees a lot of time, energy and love allowing us to focus on creation. There are indeed many unanswered questions with CC0 music. As Jonathan Mann and Simon de la Rouviere have pointed out, you can’t fully compare visual CC0 projects to music CC0. However, these are all theories and hypotheses that still needed to be tested. That’s what we are interested in, the experimentation and testing of these boundaries.

Not only for the purposes of carving new paths for other artists and collectives to follow, but also for our own artistic need to create and play in new ways. Inviting participation from the outside world in this extreme way is exhilarating, freeing, and a whole lot of fun!

L.Ariel: “What happens? Your art becomes a form of play. You’re almost jubilant in its demise. And in our case, no death or damage is imminent; instead, with CC0 we’ve given birth to a million forms of music, each sound, word, stem and beat a tiny seedling in the hands of its next creator, to do with as they will.”

Afterall, isn’t that a big part of why music grabs us? It’s something that has more value when it is shared with our fellow humans. Our hope is that by letting go of the traditional legal containers, constraints, and protections we will be able to push into a new unexplored space.

Kevin Neaton: “We are fortunate to possess a legal mechanism that grants us the ability to return creative works to the public domain, enabling others to freely build and expand upon these works. Music gifted to the public domain is just the start—an invitation to collaborate in the creation of something new and potentially unexpected—another invitation. Through collective creation, we relax the constraints of individualism and reveal the potential of the group.”

So what did we actually release into the public domain?

The Mixtape

Once we completed the cloak collaboration we realized that these songs needed to be released as a stand alone piece as well. With some special dev help from Songcamp community member Kevin Neaton, we launched a mixtape of all 16 songs. The goal was to do a soft launch of the music to give us a little extra time to determine the best way to release the individual song 1:1 and associated stems. We set a conspicuous 77 Mixtape NFTs threshold as our target for when we would begin to release the songs and stems to the public, assuming it might be several weeks or even months before that threshold was reached.

Whoops. We reached 81 in less than a month!

Soooo thanks to the surprisingly fast support from the community, we’ve decided to put a rush on our release plan. Here’s what’s next from the CC0lab squad:

Next CC0pportunities

• Completed - Mixtape threshold of 77 mints reached to unlock stems

• Completed - All 16 mixtape songs 1:1 released on Catalog

• Completed - Stems minted on Arpeggi

• March 13th - Big announcements

  • Remix cooperation public announcement!

  • All stems avail on site for download

• May - Submission deadline for all remixes (send em here)

• May  - Listening party + minting of selected songs on Present Materials! *We’ll share the proceeds 90/10 between the remixer (90%) and CC0labs (10%).

What happens after that? It’s in your hands as much as ours now.