Jimmy and I also did a podcast on music, namely the “art” of remixing and mashing-up audio. Here’s our script:
CLIP #1: “Set it Off” – Girl Talk
“In his fourth album Feed the Animals, Girl Talk (a.k.a. Gregg Gillis) used 322 samples to create an eclectic and creative work. In the track you just heard, ‘Set it Off,’ 24 different songs were used — Gillis meshes popular hits such as Rihanna’s ‘Umbrella,’ with tracks from Vanilla Ice, Aerosmith, The Spinners, and Radiohead among others. Girl Talk joins a group of re-mixing pioneers including DJ Shadow and DJ Dangermouse. Dangermouse is regarded as one of the first to successfully create a ‘mash-up’, famously (and illegally) remixing the Beatles’ White Album and Jay-Z’s Black Album. Here’s a clip…”
CLIP #2 : “Change Clothes” – DJ Danger Mouse
“Dangermouse, along with other mash-up artists have revolutionized the way we think about music and the way we think about audio. Remixing is a relatively new mode of thinking about audio, and mash-ups are but an infant genre. All of the possibilities have not yet been explored. While a lot of electronically synthesized music can sound the same, the variations alone that exist in Girl Talk and Dangermouse’s music hint at the boundless opportunities that digital music provides. Re-mixing and re-editing, not even for the purpose of mashing up 2 or more totally different pieces of music, has also become a way to creatively enhance music. Take, for example, AmpLive’s rendition of Radiohead’s ‘Reckonerz.'”
CLIP # 3: “Reckonerz (ft. Charli2na)” – AmpLive
“Audio softwares such as Garage Band make it easy to re-mix music; in fact, Girl Talk was known to have composed Feed the Animals in his basement, on his MacBook, using nothing but Garage Band. Anyone with a Macbook has the built-in capacity to use Garage Band — and anyone with a music library can drag-and-drop tunes directly into Garage Band and mix to their heart’s content. Technology’s progression has made it possible to remix and DJ with ease — and several years ago, this was not necessarily the case. Technology has also made it easy to circumvent copyright laws. Dangermouse and Girl Talk have both encountered issues involving copyright and property laws. There are some who criticize an artists’ ability to mash-up and remix without paying loyalties; while others claim that some songs are so outdated, or in Girl Talk’s case, used so minimally and unrecognizably, that there is no need to make a fuss. There is also the issue of distributing remixes and mash-ups for free on the internet. Websites devoted to the downloading of remixes have featured the mash-up ‘Brush Your Bittersweet Shoulders Off,’ a meshing of The Verve’s ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ and Jay-Z’s ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder.’ Here it is…”
CLIP # 4: “Brush Your Bittersweet Shoulders Off” – The Verve vs. Jay-Z
“Audio has the capacity to reinvent what has already been created. Artists such as Girl Talk and Dangermouse mix, mash, and collage to produce something new. In much the same way Adobe Photoshop has the ability to alter a picture, Garage Band has the ability to alter a song. What is unique to audio, however, is music itself. Yes, music can be written in a score form, or in lyrical form, but there is no literal sound to the written word. You can convey with audio something that is entirely unique to sound — images and writing cannot always affect a person in the way that music does.”
