Brightest Young Things

Imagine being in the park in the late 70s watching Grandmaster Flash break his record player until it suddenly sounded like drums. Imagine watching Link Wray stab an ice-pick through his amplifier and make it go bEEEROOOWWWWW all distorted and loud at a sock hop in the late 50s. Imagine sitting in a concert hall for 3 minutes before realizing John Cage wasn't going to play that piano. Imagine going over to your buddy Fritz's house and he just bought something called a MiniMoog and he starts fiddling with it and humming about an Autobahn and it's 1972 and you're in freakin' Germany for fuck's sake. My point is that sometimes it takes years and years for a single technical innovation to create massive change in music style but sometimes it instantly creates an entire form through the efforts of a genius and you can pinpoint the moment where it happened and go OOOH I WISH  I WAS THERE THEN.

Well you don't have to imagine no more little spaceman because you are there right now and this is it-- Thru-You: http://thru-you.com/

Piecing it together: a Israeli DJ and psychedelic reggae musician named Kutiman decided to crawl through amatuer youtube solo pieces and find a bunch  to mix together using recent fiendishly easy-to-use video editing software. He found clips that
1. were in the same key
2. had similar tempos
3. fit the style he was trying to make work for the song
4. looked pretty awesome and 5. sounded cool as shit also.

A sample of what he sampled:
Singer on Someday
Rapper on I'm New
Singer on I'm New
Dancehall singer on This is What it Became.
Blues singer on Funk
Drummer on Funk
Drummer on Babylon
Temple Gong on Soon
Talkbox on Wait for Me
Hand Claps on Wait
Singer on Lady
Cash register

Notice how most of these have very few views. Those must have been hard to find. He probably was doing this day and night for God knows how long. Then he had to edit them into music. Then he put them on a really good looking website. Then that thing happened, where everyone saw it and everything was different after.

I'm sure you realize what's so amazing about this. First of all so many of these beats and analog instruments sound good because they were cheaply recorded with small ambient mics in rough rooms rather than professionals with racks of compressors and isolation booths. So they sounded warm and distorted and nuanced rather than clipped and clean and soulless. Crate-diggers have totally plundered the era before digital recording, this could open up a whole new universe of sampling opportunities.

These samples are original songs, as far as I know. This is why the video element of the project is so important--part of its appeal is the connecting not just of multiple cultures and styles and traditions, but of artists creating by themselves. Since most pieces are a capella, they are alone when they  make them, fashioning a sliver of something that in their head must be much bigger. The old jazz drummer noodling on the cymbals is hearing a quartet drop in behind him on the one....the Brooklyn noise rock kid poking at a cobbled together string of light-sensors and cathode tubes hears his squeals woven  into beats and samples...and the woman in  the dark room letting her voice overload off the drywall after whispering an intro feels an orchestra swell around her lines and she's right, there it is. Lonely musicians knew it all along, we're part of a family whose roots extend deeper than any bloodline--its more like a species of human that we only become when we make the sounds come together. Look at their faces, they seem to see each other. "Sweet gong riff dawg, now check out this wicked contrabass sax solo!"

Like Bizet making L'Arlesienne or the Dust Brothers making Paul's Boutique, the brilliance is in finding a new way for a composer to adopt elements of extant song into a unique mode of presentation. It's the fact that in this case sitting at your computer watching this and wearing headphones is in fact not only allowed but the preferred method of accessing this artwork that makes it so different from Girltalk or Negativeland. The songs themselves are cool, but it's almost a new medium-- a symphony of the zeitgeist. Anyone could have done it, but nobody could have done it more decisively. In this way Mr. K has challenged the world to be new.

Download the songs:
The mother of all funk chords
This is what it became
Babylon Band
I am new
Someday
Wait for me
Just a lady

If downloads don't work get them all here.

Youtube of all videos here.
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