Panda Bear (musician)
Noah Benjamin Lennox known by his moniker Panda Bear, is an American musician, singer-songwriter and co-founding member of the experimental pop band Animal Collective. In addition to his work with that group, Lennox has released six solo LPs since 1999, his third, Person Pitch, is noted for influencing a wide range of subsequent indie music in addition to inspiring the chillwave genre and numerous soundalike acts. Lennox was raised in Baltimore, where he sang tenor in his high school chamber choir, studied piano and cello; the name "Panda Bear" derived from his habit of drawing pandas on his early mixtapes as a teenager. He is based in Lisbon, Portugal. Lennox grew up in the Roland Park section of Baltimore and attended Waldorf School of Baltimore through 8th grade, Kimberton Waldorf School in Chester County, Pennsylvania for high school, his family moved during his early years, owing to his father's studies to be an orthopedic surgeon. As a youth, he played sports soccer and basketball, his brother, Matt Lennox, was a leading player on the high school basketball team and Noah was a team member, playing as point guard.
Lennox has stated in interviews that he enjoyed drawing a lot as a teenager pandas, started drawing pandas on his early mixtapes. He studied piano until he was eight cello, on he sang tenor in his high school chamber choir. Though he and his family have never been religious, Lennox attended Boston University where he majored in religion because of his interest in "the concept of God"; as a teen, Lennox began listening to electronic music styles such as house and techno, artists such as Aphex Twin, all of which became a major influence on his work. He performed music -- solo and with friends. Lennox started using the name "Panda Bear" because he drew pictures of pandas for the artwork of his recordings. Lennox had been friends with Deakin since the second grade. Deakin introduced Lennox to his high school friends Avey Geologist. For years, the four of them swapped homemade recordings, shared musical ideas and performed in different group configurations. Lennox, along with Deakin moved to New York in 2000.
The band became more collaborative in nature and they settled on the name "Animal Collective". Since the 2007 releases of Panda Bear's Person Pitch and Animal Collective's Strawberry Jam, he has focused more on using samplers and other electronics in their shows, he has named Black Dice as a major influence stating "Black Dice took us on our first tour and I feel like the wisest things I’ve learned about being in a band I learned by watching them." He said he looks to Black Dice "as a model for a band... I feel like as a band, I can't speak for the other guys, but for myself, like I modelled the way I approach to everything with the band watching the way Black Dice did it." In addition to singing, Lennox played drums and guitar in Animal Collective's live performances. He cites Stewart Copeland as the biggest influence on his drumming style. Lennox's early musical influences included electronic styles, his solo work has been variously characterized as experimental pop, bedroom pop, neo-psychedelic pop, indie rock.
Lennox's debut album Panda Bear was released in 1999 on Soccer Star Records. After focusing more on touring and recording with Animal Collective, he released the follow-up Young Prayer in 2004 and the acclaimed third solo album Person Pitch in 2007. Of his songwriting style, Lennox says "I get impatient writing songs, I can't spend more than a couple of hours before I get frustrated. So I got to kind of spit it out real fast. My favorite songs are the ones where I worked really fast on, when it comes all out in like two hours or something."Panda Bear's fourth album Tomboy was released April 12, 2011 on his own label, Paw Tracks. He had started performing material from Tomboy on December 5, 2008, at a show with No Age in Miami, Florida. During a brief European tour in January 2010, he played three shows consisting entirely of new material. On March 7, 2010, a tour setlist with titles for ten of the new songs was posted on Panda Bear's MySpace blog. Panda Bear has played Primavera Sound Festival in 2010.
The single "Tomboy" and the b-side "Slow Motion" were released in July 2010. It was announced in August that singles "You Can Count on Me" and "Alsatian Darn" would be released via Domino on September 28; the limited 500 copies of "You Can Count On Me" sold out in less than a day. The single "Last Night at the Jetty" was released December 2010; the single "Surfer's Hymn" was released March 28, 2011. His song "Comfy In Nautica" appears in ABC's 2010 global warming movie Earth 2100 Lennox was chosen by Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel to perform at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival that he planned to curate in December 2011 in Minehead, England. However, Lennox was unable to play when the event was rescheduled to March 2012. In June 2013, Panda Bear performed a set of all new material at ATP. In October 2014, the Mr Noah EP was released; the full album, Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, was released in January 2015. Lennox plays in the band Jane and Together with DJ Scott Mou, he has performed on tracks with Atlas Sound and electronic musicians Zomby and Pantha du Prince.
Panda Bear appeared on the track "Doin' It Right" on the 2013 Daft Punk album, Random Access Memories. The album won Daft
Young Prayer
Young Prayer is the second solo album by American experimental pop musician Panda Bear, released on September 28, 2004. It follows his debut solo album Panda Bear. Notably, none of the songs on the album has a title because Lennox wanted the album to be "one nugget of sound. I put the track markers in there just to separate the sections."The songs were all written around the time of the death of Lennox' father. About this fact, Lennox said: In another Interview, Lennox got into detail about this: The whole album was written in a quick process and recorded with Animal Collective member Deakin in "two or three days or something." According to the artist, it "is classically influenced. All the weird baroque flourishes and stuff in terms of the way I’m singing. And, intentional, I set out to do something that sounded like that." The album was produced and mixed without Lennox by Rusty Santos and the rest of Animal Collective. Though it was changed quite a bit during the post-production, Lennox was "very happy with the way it sounded" when he received the result.
The album art was produced by Abby Portner, the sister of fellow Animal Collective member Dave Portner aka Avey Tare. The album was a critical success being labeled "Best New Music" by Pitchfork. All tracks written by Noah Lennox
Sampling (music)
In music, sampling is the reuse of a portion or sample of a sound recording in another recording. Samples may comprise rhythm, speech, or other sounds, they are integrated using hardware or software such as digital audio workstations. A process similar to sampling originated in the 1940s with musique concrète, experimental music created by splicing and looping tape; the term sampling was coined by in the late 1970s by the creators of the Fairlight CMI, an influential early sampler that became a staple of 1980s pop music. The 1988 release of the first Akai MPC, an affordable sampler with an intuitive interface, made sampling accessible to a wider audience. Sampling is a foundation of hip hop music, with producers sampling funk and soul records drum breaks, which could be rapped over. Musicians have created albums assembled from samples, such as DJ Shadow's 1996 album Endtroducing; the practice has influenced all genres of music and is important to electronic music, hip hop and pop. Sampling without permission can infringe copyright.
The process of acquiring permission for a sample is known as clearance, which can be a complex and costly process. Landmark legal cases, such as Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc in 1991, changed how samples are used; as the court ruled that unlicensed sampling constitutes copyright infringement, samples from well known sources are now prohibitively expensive. In the 1940s, Pierre Schaeffer developed musique concrète, an experimental form of music created by recording sounds to tape, splicing them, manipulating them to create sound collages, he created pieces using recordings of sounds including the human body and kitchen utensils. The method involved the creation of tape loops, splicing lengths of tape end to end, by which a sound could be played indefinitely. Schaeffer developed a tape recorder, the Phonogene, which played loops at twelve different pitches triggered by a keyboard. Composers including John Cage, Edgar Varèse, Karheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis experimented with musique concrète, Bebe and Louis Barron used it to create the first electronic film soundtrack, for the 1956 science fiction film Forbidden Planet.
It was brought to a mainstream audience by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which used these early sampling techniques to produce soundtracks for shows including Doctor Who. In the 1960s, Jamaican dub reggae producers such as King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry began using pre-recorded samples of reggae rhythms to produce riddim tracks, which were deejayed over. Jamaican immigrants introduced dub sampling techniques to American hip hop music in the 1970s; the term sampling was coined by in the late 1970s by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel to describe a feature of their Fairlight CMI synthesizer. Designers of early samplers used the term to describe the technical process of the instruments, rather than to describe how users would use the feature. While developing the Fairlight, Vogel sampled around a second of a piano piece from a radio broadcast, discovered that he could imitate a real piano by playing the sample back at different pitches, he recalled in 2005: It sounded remarkably like a piano, a real piano.
This had never been done before... By today's standards it was a pretty awful piano sound, but at the time it was a million times more like a piano than anything any synthesiser had churned out. So I realised that we didn't have to bother with all the synthesis stuff. Just take the sounds, whack them in the memory and away you go. Compared to samplers, the Fairlight offered limited control over samples, it allowed control over pitch and envelope, could only record a few seconds of sound. However, its ability to sample and play back acoustic sounds became its most popular feature. Though the concept of reusing recordings in larger recordings was not new, the Fairlight's built-in sequencer and design made the process simple. According to the Guardian, the Fairlight was the "first world-changing sampler". Though it was it was unaffordable for most hobbyists, early users included Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Thomas Dolby, Duran Duran, Herbie Hancock, Todd Rundgren and Ebn Ozn. An early pulse-code modulation digital sampler was Toshiba's LMD-649, created in 1981 by engineer Kenji Murata for Japanese electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra, who used it for extensive sampling and looping in their 1981 album Technodelic.
The LMD-649 played and recorded PCM samples at 12-bit audio depth and 50 kHz sampling rate, stored in 128 KB of dynamic RAM. The success of the Fairlight inspired competitors, improving the technology and driving down prices dramatically. Early competitors included the E-mu Emulator and the Akai S950. Drum machines such as the Oberheim DMX and Linn LM-1 began incorporating samples of drum kits rather than generating sounds from circuits; the designers of early samplers anticipated that users would sample short sounds, such as drum hits or individual notes, to use as "building blocks" for compositions. However and producers began sampling longer passages of music. In the words of Greg Milner, author of Perfecting Sound Forever, "They didn't just want the sound of John Bonham's kick drum, they wanted to loop and repeat the whole of'When the Levee Breaks'." Roger Linn, designer of the LM-1 and MPC, said: "It was a pleasant surprise. After sixty years of recording, there are so many. Why reinvent the wheel?"In response to demand, samplers such as E-mu's SP-1200 were developed to allow users to store longer samples.
In 1988, Akai released the first MPC sampler, which allowed artists to assign samples to separate pads and trigger them independently to playing a keyboard or drum kit. It h
Animal Collective
Animal Collective is an American experimental pop band formed in Baltimore, Maryland in 2003. Its members and founders are Avey Tare, Panda Bear and Geologist; the band's music is characterized by studio experimentation, vocal harmonies, an exploration of various genres which include freak folk, noise rock, ambient drone, psychedelia. Records released under the name "Animal Collective" may include contributions from any or all of its members. In the case of Dibb, who takes breaks from recording and performing with the band, his time off does not constitute full leave; the band members met in school and started recording together in various forms of collaboration from a young age. A duo comprising Lennox and Portner, the collective was not established until all four members came together for the album Here Comes the Indian. Most prior collaborations between the band members were retroactively classified under Animal Collective's discography. In 1999, they established the record label Paw Tracks, issuing what is now considered their debut album, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, as well as work by other artists.
In 2009, the band released Merriweather Post Pavilion. Its rich, reverb-heavy sound proved influential to much subsequent popular music. Animal Collective grew out of childhood friendships in Baltimore County. Noah Lennox and Josh Dibb met in the second grade at the Waldorf School of Baltimore and became good friends. After the eighth grade, Lennox went away to a Waldorf high school in Pennsylvania, while Dibb enrolled at The Park School of Baltimore, where David Portner had studied since grade school. In 1993, Brian Weitz moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore County and began attending Park as well, becoming friends with Portner. According to Lennox, they attended "progressive" schools that emphasized creativity and artistic self-expression as part of "a complete kind of education". Weitz and Portner started playing music together at the age of fifteen because of their shared love of the band Pavement and horror movies, their musical range included cover songs by Pavement and The Cure as well as the songs "Poison" by Bell Biv DeVoe and "Seasons In The Sun" by Terry Jacks.
When Portner and Weitz met Dibb in high school, they started an indie rock band called Automine with schoolmates Brendan Fowler and David Shpritz, being the only ones they knew who wrote their own songs. "We set up a show with four bands—bands that were different formations of us", Portner remembered in an interview with Baltimore City Paper. At that time, the group did not have any contact to the music scene in Baltimore and "was more about the back porch." In 1995, Automine self-released the 7-inch-single Paddington Band. Around that time, they had their first experiences with psychedelic drugs like LSD and started to improvise while playing music; the four started to discover psychedelic and experimental music like Noggin, as well as krautrock-related bands such as Silver Apples and Can. Meanwhile, Dibb had introduced Lennox to Portner and Weitz, the four of them began playing music in different group lineups, producing several home recordings and swapping them and sharing ideas. Using a drum machine for the first time and Portner started a duo called Wendy Darling, whose sound was inspired by soundtracks of horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and The Shining György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki.
In 1997, Lennox and Dibb both went off to college in the Boston area, while Portner and Weitz attended schools in New York City. Lennox and Dibb assembled Lennox's debut album, Panda Bear, during this time from the multitude of recordings Lennox had made in the previous years and established their own label, Soccer Star Records, to release it. Abhorring the new life as a student at NYU, along with Weitz, returned to Maryland every summer to meet Lennox and Dibb and play music together. At that time Portner was working on a record, which would become Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished. Portner asked Lennox to play drums on the record and they recorded them along with piano and acoustic guitars in the summer of 1999; the rest of the year, Portner returned to Maryland on weekends to record overdubs and finish the mixing. It was released in the following summer under the name Avey Tare and Panda Bear. Soccer Star morphed into the Animal label, with the intention of putting out music that came from the four musicians.
In parallel with his environmental policy and marine biology studies, Weitz hosted a noise show at WKCR, Columbia's college radio station. On weekends, he and Portner borrowed avant-garde music records and listened to them all night at Weitz's dorm room which broadened their musical horizon. In the summer of 2000, the four friends spent several months at Portner's apartment in downtown New York City intensely playing music together using antiquated synthesizers, acoustic guitars, household objects. According to Lennox, in this summer the basis for all of Animal Collective's music was created. However, all recordings of this period were stolen when Portner changed apartments and packed up the car the night before he moved. While studying, Dave Portner organized shows at New York University for a while; as he had class together with Eric Copeland, he organized a show for his band Black Dice and became friends with him. In 2000, Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished was finished and Dibb left school in Boston and moved to New York and the group's music became mu
Electronic musical instrument
An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal, plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener. An electronic instrument might include a user interface for controlling its sound by adjusting the pitch, frequency, or duration of each note. A common user interface is the musical keyboard, which functions to the keyboard on an acoustic piano, except that with an electronic keyboard, the keyboard itself does not make any sound. An electronic keyboard sends a signal to a synth module, computer or other electronic or digital sound generator, which creates a sound. However, it is common to separate user interface and sound-generating functions into a music controller and a music synthesizer with the two devices communicating through a musical performance description language such as MIDI or Open Sound Control.
All electronic musical instruments can be viewed as a subset of audio signal processing applications. Simple electronic musical instruments are sometimes called sound effects. In the 2010s, electronic musical instruments are now used in most styles of music. In popular music styles such as electronic dance music all of the instrument sounds used in recordings are electronic instruments. Development of new electronic musical instruments and synthesizers continues to be a active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, have organized to report cutting-edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music with new electronic music instruments and synthesizers. In the 18th-century and composers adapted a number of acoustic instruments to exploit the novelty of electricity. Thus, in the broadest sense, the first electrified musical instrument was the Denis d'or keyboard, dating from 1753, followed shortly by the clavecin électrique by the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in 1761.
The Denis d'or consisted of a keyboard instrument of over 700 strings, electrified temporarily to enhance sonic qualities. The clavecin électrique was a keyboard instrument with plectra activated electrically. However, neither instrument used electricity as a sound-source; the first electric synthesizer was invented in 1876 by Elisha Gray. The "Musical Telegraph" was a chance by-product of his telephone technology when Gray accidentally discovered that he could control sound from a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit and so invented a basic oscillator; the Musical Telegraph used steel reeds oscillated by electromagnets and transmitted over a telephone line. Gray built a simple loudspeaker device into models, which consisted of a diaphragm vibrating in a magnetic field. A significant invention, which had a profound effect on electronic music, was the audion in 1906; this was the first thermionic valve, or vacuum tube and which led to the generation and amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, electronic computation, among other things.
Other early synthesizers included the Telharmonium, the Theremin, Jörg Mager's Spharophon and Partiturophone, Taubmann's similar Electronde, Maurice Martenot's ondes Martenot, Trautwein's Trautonium. The Mellertion used a non-standard scale, Bertrand's Dynaphone could produce octaves and perfect fifths, while the Emicon was an American, keyboard-controlled instrument constructed in 1930 and the German Hellertion combined four instruments to produce chords. Three Russian instruments appeared, Oubouhof's Croix Sonore, Ivor Darreg's microtonal'Electronic Keyboard Oboe' and the ANS synthesizer, constructed by the Russian scientist Evgeny Murzin from 1937 to 1958. Only two models of this latter were built and the only surviving example is stored at the Lomonosov University in Moscow, it has been used in many Russian movies -- like Solaris -- to produce "cosmic" sounds. Hugh Le Caine, John Hanert, Raymond Scott, composer Percy Grainger, others built a variety of automated electronic-music controllers during the late 1940s and 1950s.
In 1959 Daphne Oram produced a novel method of synthesis, her "Oramics" technique, driven by drawings on a 35 mm film strip. This workshop was responsible for the theme to the TV series Doctor Who, a piece created by Delia Derbyshire, that more than any other ensured the popularity of electronic music in the UK. In 1897 Thaddeus Cahill patented. Using tonewheels to generate musical sounds as electrical signals by additive synthesis, it was capable of producing any combination of notes and overtones, at any dynamic level; this technology was used to design the Hammond organ. Between 1901 and 1910 Cahill had three progressively larger and more complex versions made, the first weighing seven tons, the last in excess of 200 tons. Portability was managed only with the use of thirty boxcars. By 1912, public interest had waned, Cahill's enterprise was bankrupt. Another development, which aroused the interest of many composers, occurred in 1919-1920. In Leningrad, Leon Theremin built and demonstrated his Etherophone, renamed the Theremin.
This led to the first composi
Twelve-inch single
The twelve-inch single is a type of gramophone record that has wider groove spacing and shorter playing time compared to LPs. This allows for louder levels to be cut on the disc by the mastering engineer, which in turn gives a wider dynamic range, thus better sound quality; this record type is used in disco and dance music genres, where DJs use them to play in clubs. They are played at either 45 rpm. Twelve-inch singles have much shorter playing time than full-length LPs, thus require fewer grooves per inch; this extra space permits a broader dynamic range or louder recording level as the grooves' excursions can be much greater in amplitude in the bass frequencies important for dance music. Many record companies began producing 12-inch singles at 33 1⁄3 rpm, although 45 rpm gives better treble response and was used on many twelve-inch singles in the UK; the gramophone records cut for dance-floor DJs came into existence with the advent of recorded Jamaican mento music in the 1950s. By at least 1956 it was standard practice by Jamaican sound systems owners to give their "selecter" DJs acetate or flexi disc dubs of exclusive mento and Jamaican rhythm and blues recordings before they were issued commercially.
Songs such as Theophilus Beckford's "Easy Snappin'" were played as exclusives by Sir Coxson's Downbeat sound system for years before they were released in 1959 – only to become major local hits pressed in the UK by Island Records and Blue Beat Records as early as 1960. As the 1960s creativity bloomed along, with the development of multitrack recording facilities, special mixes of rocksteady and early reggae tunes were given as exclusives to dancehall DJs and selecters. With the 1967 Jamaican invention of remix, called dub on the island, those "specials" became valuable items sold to allied sound system DJs, who could draw crowds with their exclusive hits; the popularity of remix sound engineer King Tubby, who singlehandedly invented and perfected dub remixes from as early as 1967, led to more exclusive dub plates being cut. By 10-inch records were used to cut those dubs. By 1971, most reggae singles issued in Jamaica included on their B-side a dub remix of the A-side, many of them first tested as exclusive "dub plates" on dances.
Those dubs included drum and bass-oriented remixes used by sound system selecters. The 10-inch acetate "specials" would remain popular until at least the 2000s in Jamaica. Several Jamaican DJs such as DJ Kool Herc exported much of the hip hop dance culture from Jamaica to the Bronx in the early 1970s, including the common Jamaican practice of DJs rapping over instrumental dub remixes of hit songs leading to the advent of rap culture in the United States. Most the widespread use of exclusive dub acetates in Jamaica led American DJs to do the same. In the United States, the twelve-inch single gramophone record came into popularity with the advent of disco music in the 1970s after earlier market experiments. In early 1970, Cycle/Ampex Records test-marketed a twelve-inch single by Buddy Fite, featuring "Glad Rag Doll" backed with "For Once in My Life"; the experiment aimed to energize the struggling singles market, offering a new option for consumers who had stopped buying traditional singles. The record was pressed at 33 rpm, with identical run times to the seven-inch 45 rpm pressing of the single.
Several hundred copies were made available for sale for 98 cents each at two Tower Records stores. Another early twelve-inch single was released in 1973 by soul/R&B musician/songwriter/producer Jerry Williams, Jr. a.k.a. Swamp Dogg. Twelve-inch promotional copies of "Straight From My Heart" were released on his own Swamp Dogg Presents label, with distribution by Jamie/Guyden Distribution Corporation, it was manufactured by Jamie Record Co. of Pennsylvania. The B-side of the record is blank; the first large-format single made for DJs was a ten-inch acetate used by a mix engineer in need of a Friday-night test copy for famed disco mixer Tom Moulton. The song was; as no 7-inch acetates could be found, a 10–inch blank was used. Upon completion, found that such a large disc with only a couple of inches worth of grooves on it made him feel silly wasting all that space, he asked Rodríguez to re-cut it so that the grooves looked more spread out and ran to the normal center of the disc. Rodriguez told him.
Because of the wider spacing of the grooves, not only was a louder sound possible but a wider overall dynamic range as well. This was noticed to give a more favorable sound for discothèque play. Moulton's position as the premiere mixer and "fix it man" for pop singles ensured that this fortunate accident would become industry practice; this would have been a natural evolution: as dance tracks became much longer than had been the average for a pop song, the DJ in the club wanted sufficient dynamic range, the format would have enlarged from the seven-inch single eventually. The broad visual spacing of the grooves on the twelve-inch made it easy for the DJ in locating the approximate area of the "breaks" on the disc's surface in dim club light. A quick study of any DJs favorite discs will reveal mild wear in
Customs
“Customs” means the Government Service, responsible for the administration of Customs law and the collection of duties and taxes and which has the responsibility for the application of other laws and regulations relating to the importation, movement or storage of goods. Each country has its own laws and regulations for the import and export of goods into and out of a country, which its customs authority enforces; the import or export of some goods may be forbidden. A wide range of penalties are faced by those. A customs duty is a tax on the importation or exportation of goods. Commercial goods not yet cleared through customs are held in a customs area called a bonded store, until processed. All authorized. At airports, customs functions as the point of no return for all passengers. Anyone arriving at an airport must clear customs before they can enter a country; those who breach the law will be detained by customs and returned to their original location. Traditionally customs has been considered as the fiscal subject that charges customs duties and other taxes on import or export.
For the recent decades the views on the functions of customs have expanded and now covers three basic issues: taxation and trade facilitation. The terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001, has become the factor that prompted a significant strengthening of the security component in the operations of the modern customs authorities, after which security-oriented control measures for supply chains have been implemented for the aims of preventing risk identification; the most complete guidelines for customs security functions implementation is provided in the WCO SAFE Framework of Standards to Secure and Facilitate Global Trade, which have received five editions in 2005, 2007, 2010, 2012 and 2018. The trade facilitation objectives were introduced into routine of customs authorities in order to reduce trade transaction costs; the contemporary understanding of the “trade facilitation” concept is based on the Recommendation No. 4 of UN / CEFACT “National Trade Facilitation Bodies”.
According to its provisions “facilitation covers formalities, procedures and operations related to international trade transactions. Its goals are simplification and standardization, so that transactions become easier and more economical than before”. In many countries, customs procedures for arriving passengers at many international airports and some road crossings are separated into red and green channels. Passengers with goods to declare go through the red channel. Passengers with nothing to declare go through the green channel. However, entry into a particular channel constitutes a legal declaration, if a passenger going through the green channel is found to be carrying goods above the customs limits or prohibited items, he or she may be prosecuted for making a false declaration to customs, by virtue of having gone through the green channel; each channel is a point of no return, once a passenger has entered a particular channel, they cannot go back. Australia, New Zealand, the United States do not operate a red and green channel system.
Airports in EU countries such as Finland, Ireland or the United Kingdom have a blue channel. As the EU is a customs union, travellers between EU countries do not have to pay customs duties. Value-added tax and excise duties may be applicable if the goods are subsequently sold, but these are collected when the goods are sold, not at the border. Passengers arriving from other EU countries go through the blue channel, where they may still be subject to checks for prohibited or restricted goods. Luggage tickets for checked luggage travelling within the EU are green-edged so they may be identified. In most EU member states, travellers coming from other EU countries can use the green lane. All airports in the United Kingdom operate a channel system, however some don't have a red channel, they instead have a red point phone which serves the same purpose. Customs are a public service provided by the government of the respective country that collects the duties levied on imported goods as well as providing security measures through which people enter and exit the country.
A public good/service is defined by being non-excludable. Once cannot avoid customs when exiting or entering a country thus making it non-excludable. There is some congestion when going through airports, with the average wait time in customs in American Domestic airports being 75.1 minutes, the congestion doesn’t discriminate based on rival-consumption thus making it a public service. Customs is part of one of the three basic functions of a government, namely: administration. However, in a bid to mitigate corruption, many countries have privatised their customs; this has occurred by way of contracting pre-shipment inspection agencies, which examine the cargo and verify the declared value before importation occurs. The country's customs is obliged to accept the agency's report for the purpose of assessing duties and taxes at the port of entry. While engaging a pre-shipment inspection agency may appear justified in a country with an inexperienced or inadequate customs establishment, the measure has not been able to plug the loophole and protect revenue.
It has been found that evasion of
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