remixing and mash-ups
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On Four Tet Remixing “Thriller” In Ten Minutes
I recently watched and re-watched a wonderful video in which Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) remixes Michael Jackson’s Thriller as part of the “Beat This” series. The challenge is to make a remix in ten minutes. The catch is that Hebden can only use sounds from Thriller. What makes the video wonderful–even a little thrilling–is Continue reading
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On Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer’s Re: ECM
The record label ECM has long interested me, ever since I used to buy second-hand jazz LPs as a teenager. (And I wrote earlier ECM-related blog posts here and here.) The brainchild of German producer Manfred Eicher, ECM is as famous for the beautiful and atmospheric recording quality of its releases–Eicher loves to record in Continue reading
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Content, Form, And Versioning A Song Everybody Knows: Gotye’s “Somebody I Used To Know”
Sometime not overly long ago, Gotye’s song “Somebody I Used To Know” went very viral–becoming a song meme that was (and still is) hard to escape, whose video on YouTube has been viewed an astonishing 259 million times (or by some 518 million ears!). At least two or three of those views were mine, the Continue reading
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On The Trickle Down Of Electronic Dance Music Aesthetics III: Acousmatic Sound And Authenticity At The 2012 Grammy Awards
“All cultural change is essentially technology-driven.” – William Gibson This year’s Grammy Awards featured the first ever performances of live electronic dance music, showcasing the DJs David Guetta and deadmau5 with R&B singer Chris Brown, rapper Lil Wayne, and the rock band Foo Fighters in what the Los Angeles Times aptly called “a confused, if Continue reading
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(Im)Perfect Congruence: On Dancing To Music
There’s a funny and almost disturbing video on YouTube that shows a couple apparently dancing to the angular beats of Autechre. The video is funny and strangely compelling because of its unlikely pairing. On the one hand, the video looks to be from the 1970s or 80s–some kind of European (Greek?) television program featuring a Continue reading
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On Marcus Boon’s In Praise Of Copying
Marcus Boon’s recent book, In Praise Of Copying (Harvard University Press, 2010), is a timely argument in favor of our freedom to freely copy one another in the name of healthy creativity. Boon, a professor of literature at York University (as well as a DJ and contributor to Wire magazine) notes that the word copy derives from the Latin “copia” which means Continue reading
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Remixing Is A Curious Thing
“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” – Igor Stravinsky To a composer used to putting together notes on a page (or notes on the virtual page of a music notation program), the craft of remixing can seem like a curious thing. Its original meaning, Continue reading
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On Designing New Musical Controllers
A while back I wrote about MIDI hardware controllers which are used by musicians who want to control their computer software. (You can read the post here.) Why does one need a controller when performing music with say, a laptop? For one thing, it gives you the sense of having physical, tactile control over your Continue reading
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