Circuitous Cuts

To offset yesterday's enthusiastic diatribe on how you should be familiar with Gayngs and their excellent album 'Relayted', today's post will be the converse. The subject for today's breakdown is an artist whose work I will fully cop to being asleep on. Max Tannone, formerly known as Minty Fresh Beats, is a mash-up artist of the finest degree, having crafted some amazingly slick projects in recent years.

Having worked the DJ scene in NY and abroad, Tannone set about creating conceptual mash-ups in a way that is both more inviting, yet trickier in execution. His work involves not just a mixtape in the sense of something to put on for a party, but creating a conceptual album, like he did in his sublime mixes of Jaydiohead. Taking two incredibly talented and revered artists and putting them together is no small feat, especially when they are so intrinsically different. The art-house, obtuse and deeply neurotic Radiohead couldn't be farther from the swagger and driving beats of one of hip hop's greatest, Jay Z. Using plenty of planning and foresight, though, Tannone has fused these artists into an amazingly cohesive unit. Not only do they blend well, but Tannone's creative choices are superb as well. The track 'Dirt Off Your Android' (mixing Dirt Off Your Shoulder and Paranoid Android) snaps with the drums just behind the acoustic riff, but its the way the main, rawk-out riff of Paranoid Android blasts excellently beneath Jay Z's rhymes. It was always a piece of the song I wanted to hear more of and Tannone recognized it for its power, wielding it deftly along the rest of the mix.

Having created these crazy good Jay Z and Radiohead mixes, Tannone set about deconstructing and reassembling one of my favorite albums, Check Your Head by The Beastie Boys. Granted, reworking what is already a phenomenally good album lends itself towards a certain level of success, but it is not a guarantee. I love the original for it's living, vibrant energy and samples, having the Beasties playing their own instruments alongside catchy, heady samples. The vocals are also fantastic here, with the group really showing what they are capable of, having 'found' their definitive styles around the period 'Check Your Head' was recorded. What Tannone has done, in an inspired move, is take the vocals from choice cuts and interpolate them over some of the instrumental cuts on the album, calling it 'Doublecheck Your Head'. The loose rapping of 'So What'cha Want' played over 'In 3s' gives birth to a whole different swing than either track held on their own. The rhythm and syncopation for each has been matched and synched perfectly, to the point that if one had never heard the original album it would be easily believable that these were the straight tracks and not "recontextualized" as he put it. 

That notion is really at the heart of what Max does - where as Girl Talk can make a crazy party mix or The Hood Internet does mixtapes of radio fare over indie, here we have the elusive organic chemistry. Tannone attempts to breakdown the illusion of the mash-up entirely in the hopes your brain interpreters the new creation as the original. When it works (as it quite often does) it works amazingly well. So many of his tracks feel seamless in the best way possible. Just being able to put to diametrically opposed artists like Radiohead and Jay Z together, let alone make them work, is an accomplishment. How many bands could essentially fold an album over itself like The Beastie Boys, like making a calzone by folding a pizza in half? 

To reiterate, I slept on this. I was not even aware of Max Tannone and his FREE releases. I'm making up for it now, though. I only found out about these mixes, and Tannone's mixing of Mos Def and Talib Kweli with Dub and Reggae music, after reading about the Selene project. Based around the movie Moon, it is a fantastic, morose and poignant sci-fi movie about loss and devotion. Tannone took samples and themes from the film and mixed them with Richard Rich's raps to create the EP. Even Duncan Jones, the director of Moon, has given his praise for the project. It's all amazing work. The EPs and mash-ups are simply fantastic. Hopefully you already knew about all this. If not, head over to his site and see what lies in store. 

Un, Deux, Trois

Nerd alert!

Even the most prolific of us get a case of the brain slugs. Mine is particularly bad today. See?

Yeah.

That bad.

So what I'll do today is simply point you in the direction of something I find to be, as John the Baptist put it, "wicked cool". 

As anyone who has known me in the last six years can attest, I loved the TV phenomenon that was Lost. There was literally no other thing that compared to it. It was its' own fundamental thing, a creation of unique zeitgeist in our modern culture. The common comparisons, although not exactly on target, were to The Stand and Twin Peaks, both of which I have loved. The show is simply one of my favorite things ever and the hole it has left in my pop-culture heart has yet to be filled. No joke, no hyperbole, I genuinely miss the eager, giddy nature of the nights it was on and the mass-theorizing that followed in the morning. I plan on doing more of an in-depth analysis in the future but for now I wanted to highlight a peripheral, or perhaps tangential aspect to the show.

An integral aspect of the hour long drama was the nature of time and its structure as a means of telling the larger story. This was initially done by splitting each episode into the current narrative and a demonstrative or character-revealing flashback to before the island story. As time went on the show (MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR A SHOW THAT NO LONGER IS ON THE AIR) switched to flash forwards and side cuts that intersected with the main story. While ostensibly just a cool way to tell a massive and sprawling tale that was akin the a novel for TV, it created a phenomenon known as 'viewer lock-out' which kept the average viewer from wanting to jump in and pick up the action in without seeing the backlog of episodes, which by season 6 was a whole hell of a lot. 

I was (still am) obsessed with this show and simply cannot say enough good things about it. I honestly feel if you have any appreciation for fictional art in any sense you should give it a chance, if for no other reason than to see one of the most amazing, beautiful (and not coincidentally expensive) TV pilots in history. If you've watched the show in its entirety, and if you're reading this that is a distinct possibility, then I want to fill you in on a very cool secret. 

Ready?

Someone possessing more skill and patience than myself took every single episode and edited them into one long, chronological take on the entire series. Instead of having to check the mind-bogglingly comprehensive Lostpedia for who did what and when, everything is presented as it happened in sequential order. The entire series is cast into a new light as a result. Everything from the beginning to The End takes on a whole new significance as a result. Characters are shown in a new light, actions have more relevance and life-long struggles are made clearer as a result. The effect is uncanny.

Obviously this website and the content hosted there is of....dubious legal standing. The show was a massive hit and made millions for ABC, but what is to be done with its legacy is still up for debate. I absolutely adore this idea. Some fans wondered if this style of consumption would be an option when the entire show was released in a single volume for Blu Ray but it has yet to be done by official sources. I still hold out hope for an official version of this, but fan edits like this are a fascinating source of intrigue for me. If you have any interest I would highly recommend giving a look, even for specific points in the show, to see how they look in new light. A deconstruction like this a shuffling of the deck and a fresh take on what is, in my mind, one of the best works of fiction in existence.

Not to be too hyperbolic.

Mash Bros. Brawl

Continuing along the idea of referential culture and pop-mashing, I want to write a bit about something I've been more than a little in love with as of late. Kids & Explosions is a musician whose work is no doubt polarizing. Simple googling of his nom-de-pc will turn up more than a handful of articles making the inevitable comparisons to the massively popular Girl Talk. The main difference, I've been able to ascertain, is that while Girl Talk has masterfully crafted his mash-ups to become a giant party mix that makes revelers say "Aha!", Kids & Explosions' ouvre seems to suggest more of a deconstruction of cherished and personal selections. Instead of taking a hook or chorus or instantly placable piece of history, K&E takes fragments that are less identifiable, less obvious, but more meaningful and in an odd way, more personal. 

The resulting album, S*** Computer, available for whatever you wish to pay. somehow feels more cohesive, organic even, when listened to as a whole. Instead of one massive mega-mix for parties, separate songs are established and realized by a musical alchemy of sorts. As pointed out in this break down Josh Raskin observed several rules for his construction of this album. While it's admirable that rule one was "The songs have to mean something to him" I think the real essence or trick lies in two and three - no effects applied and no pitch shifting what so ever. By breaking down songs and piecing them back together via similarities the original artists never intended, the resulting product is both novel and familiar. It bridges that gap in our minds where we know something and yet are figuring it out. Its as if the entire album exists in that transitional moment of recognition, which is an astounding accomplishment in my mind. It's as though you were falling in love forever, or permanently tasting a new dish with every bite. Along these lines, the music created by adding say, two samples together, creates not just the one on top of the other, as is often the case with mash-ups, but actually touches on a third separate song that until now may have existed, albeit only potentially. The musical equivalent of potential energy, if you will. 


An interesting cheat or caveat to the aforementioned rules is that while there is no pitch shifting to be found, there are deconstructions, tweaks and clear rearrangements. In the first minute of the album it's apparent Eminem's vocals have been chopped up and reordered. What we hear is odd - it feels like you're hearing the song you know, yet because it's in a manner that flips your expectations, as well as over the piano chords of Bryan Adam's 'Everything I Do', your mind again construes it as having been previously experienced yet feeling entirely unfamiliar. The product is thoroughly uncanny. To reiterate what I stated earlier, the feeling of two or more preexisting pieces coming together to create a unique third piece is akin to procreation, which Raskin jokes about in the aforementioned interview with Laura Lanktree. He describes it as songs "having sex" and the results feel suitably organic despite the buzzes and twists. One could guess the title of the album refers to the idea of a hard drive crashing and we're hearing the neurons cross-firing, like HAL in 2001 as it sings 'Daisy' during shutdown.


A further distinction from his Mash-Up bretheren lies in the mood of the album, which instead of being a thumping club banger, is more wistful and even haunting at times. Josh Raskin has made choices and discoveries via his palate that have meshed incredably well. I feel like it serves better as music for a small gathering for cocktails than ripping up a houseparty. Maybe I'm just getting older. OR maybe I'm just playing favorites. To be perfectly honest I didn't even have my ear to the ground. Rather, I stumbles across the album via Popmatter's excellent year-end list of the best free music of 2010. Looking to broaden horizons without breaking any laws (which, given the legal grey area of sampling to this extent is more than a little bit ironic) I checked out their recommendations and was blown away by what I had found. Among the many awesome recommendations was Kids & Explosions.


While the list I linked above is filled with excellent new music, please give a listen to Kids & Explosions, if for no other reason than to hear the future of our modern culture twisting referentiality into a genre of music.

01/10

Bonjour.

The subject of this post may very well be past the expiration date in regards to pop culture relativity but I still find myself fascinated by it. One of those secret things I would gush over during a happy hour and monopolize conversations and warrant a smiling shake of your head. As a result I sit here typing this in the hopes you might be as amused by the idea as me. Although now that I think about it, if you knew, you'd already have known, and then there's causality and preternatural....you know what? I'm just gonna cut right to the meat of my zeal here.

Many, many, many nerds on the internet (and music snobs, and hipsters, et cetera) have generally agreed that one of, if not the best, albums of the 90's was Radiohead's opus OK Computer. Personally, I do agree that it is a fantastic piece of guitar driven popmusic, albeit a bit gloomy. BUT! That very same gloom appeals to me. I have become aware that I appreaciate the album more on days of melancholy, or during time spent reflecting (as opposed to road trips or when I'm cleaning my condo). There's a joy in melancholy, a peace through sadness that I know I have felt before and it rears its head when I listen to the album on a crisp fall day.

Ten years later, digital distribution has finally become the norm and CD sales in the traditional, literal sense have fallen off. Thom Yorke, frontman extraordinaire has gone increasingly schizo and detests his own reputaiton for alternative music, going so far as to release the (denied to be but still totally is) double album Kid A/Amnesiac. Hail to the Thief, the next album, saw a return, ever so slightly, to their renowned milleu. Going off the deep end into electric noises and distorted, atonal jazz pieces had anyone still listening (millions of people) wondering what they would do next.

The answer was the pay what you want In Rainbows, which when held in the same light as their previous work, was still genius but more traditional. An absolutely beautiful album, but no huge genre shift or breakage of pre-established paradigms. Critically hailed, embraced by all, why are you typing this, you ask? If I'm no music critic, why the inspection and rehashing?

Paranoia, that's why.

A conspiracy of sorts!

If you know me at all (my condolences), you may know I'm just a little bit into the idea.

Covered in another blog by Puddlegum a couple years back, the basic idea put forth is that In Rainbows is not just another album in their discography but in fact an expansion of OK Computer, an insertion of table leaves, if you will. Insane premise or not, I LOVE this idea.

The concept apparently originates in a bit of numerology and binary, that OK Computer serves as the 01 and In Rainbows as 10, the two pieces complimenting each other. Fun supporting evidence: a working title for OK Computer was Zeros and Ones. The track list starts with Computer's 'Airbag' (which has a deeply moving opening riff that feels like the guitar channeling a cello) alternates from there on out with Rainbows going back and forth, switching in the middle, and then the reverse back and forth for the latter half of both albums. Made as a playlist in iTunes with the cross-fade set to about five seconds, the effect is rather unnerving. Some segues don't work as well, but there are a few transitions that one would think "Oh my lord, this could have been intentional." In particular the transition from 'Bodysnatchers' to 'Subterranean Homesick Alien' is eerie, mostly due to (most likely coincidental) corresponding key signatures.

Just the idea that musicians would be so inclined (or perhaps bored is more on target) to create art that is supposed to be inserted into existing works is absolutely enthralling to me. Even more so that it would be a weirdly hush-hush thing, not widely known and only found by people extremely curious about it. In my mind it's like if in American Gothic we suddenly realize there is an entire painting of the interior of the house in the background that is hidden under the frame.

While definitely one of the nerdier/paranoid things I've fallen in love with, it's just something that I find enthralling as a concept. One I wish more artists would embrace. Maybe I'll hide a secret blog inside this one, and inside that blog would be a link to my psychiatrist's home page, because that's where my neurosis would lead to, right?

Winter

In the interest of shooting myself in the foot as fast as possible I'm gonna cover a couple things at once.To boot, one thing is already massively unpopular and the other gets little-to-no recognition. It's really the combo of the two that I'm in love with.These two great tastes that I love together?


Dark winter mornings and Akira Yamaoka.





Wait, why are you running away? Hear me out.



I know it sounds nuts, especially in the midst of the darkest part of the winter. The stretch after the holidays is, as my fiance points out, is nothing but endless winter.

No fun days off. No big party holidays. No reprieve. Just endless dark and cold.

Thing is, I love waking up in the morning and making the (brief) walk to the bus station in the dark while listening to Akria Yamaoka.

"Who is that?" you ask, quite rightfully so.

"An awesome musician" I answer gushingly. A composer whose long and varied career has wrapped around another of my loves, Silent Hill.

Silent Hill is a series of freaky deeky video games that elicit most of their renowned disturbing moments and scary reputation from the mood and ambience they present. I won't delve into detail in this post, I'll ramble on about my long love affair with those particular games another time. The music, though...

As I said, the series is heavily reliant on mood and ambience, a significant portion of which stems from Yamaoka's contribution. His soundtracks to these games go one of two ways - either industrial and machine-like grinding beats and crunching guitars, or trip hop and down-tempo subdued pieces that amplify the effect of introspection and solitude on the listener. Admittedly I am far more in love with the softer aspects of his writing. I find them absolutely haunting and eerie in the best way possible. Slow and soft drums and loops, melodies from a weeping guitar.

Here's my small cheat: I make a playlist in itunes of just the more ambient atmospheric pieces. Keeps me from the shock of NIN-style blasts of noise as I'm still waking up. Mix this with the quiet contemplation that presents itself from walking to work in the dark and you've got a serene way to start the day. The sky is still dark, almost purple. Streetlights glow that odd orange tone that reflects off the snow. It's quiet around, no noise but the occasional car passing. Haunting, really.

Granted it may be my love of horror movies, a long-fostered love of solitude and personal reflection or just a skewed sense of musical appreciation, but I am in love with starting my day as though I'm in the peaceful opening to a very peculiar movie. Long before any unpleasant plot twists.



Makes me sound like a monk, perhaps.



Point is I love this composer's work and the je-ne-sais quoi air of a quiet January morning.