Image source: Gullbuy

Text source: The New Yorker

January 10, 2005

In July of 2003, Jeremy Brown, a.k.a. DJ Reset, took apart a song. Using digital software, Brown isolated instrumental elements of “Debra,” a song by Beck from his 1999 album “Midnite Vultures.” Brown, who is thirty-three and has studied with Max Roach, adjusted the tempo of “Debra” and added live drums and human beat-box noises that he recorded at his small but tidy house in Long Island City. Then he sifted through countless a-cappella vocals archived on several hard drives. Some a-cappellas are on commercially released singles, specifically intended for d.j. use, while others appear on the Internet, having been leaked by people working in the studio where the song was recorded, or sometimes even by the artist.

After auditioning almost a thousand vocals, Brown found that an a-cappella of “Frontin’,” a collaboration between the rapper Jay-Z and the producer Pharrell Williams, was approximately in the same key as “Debra.” The two songs are not close in style—“Debra” is a tongue-in-cheek take on seventies soul music, while “Frontin’ ” is hard and shimmering computer music—but the vocalists are doing something similar. Brown exploited this commonality, and used his software to put the two singers exactly in tune.

Read the entire article at The New Yorker

Abbey Road ipod mash up

Image source: xlr8r.com
Text source: Business Week
AUGUST 31, 2006

Byte of the Apple

The two titans are drawing closer together. If they would just combine their offerings, they’d pose a real threat to Microsoft

I have an admittedly odd affinity for remembering TV advertisements I saw as a very young child. Sometimes those memories pop up when I least expect them.

Today I’ve been thinking of a spot that those of a certain age will remember well: Two guys walking, one eating chocolate, the other, inexplicably eating peanut butter out of a jar. They bump, and the chocolate drops into the jar. The rest, of course, has become marketing history, summed up by the jingle for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: “Two great tastes that taste great together.”

Funny, the ad comes to mind in the wake of an announcement that Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt is joining the board at Apple Computer (AAPL). It’s the latest indication these two Silicon Valley stalwarts are getting closer all the time. And the possibilities for cooperation between the two are legion.

Read the entire article at Business Week

Image source: gohomeproductions.co.uk

Text source: earcandy_mag.tripod.com

December 17, 2004

Intro:
Some call it artistic musical creations, while others cry that it is blasphemy! It is all the rage in the U.K. and it has even gone mainstream, with MTV U.K. celebrating it on “MTV-Mash”. This new craze is called “mash-ups” and it involves taking the vocal from one song and joining it to the instrumental track of another. For instance, take a “mash-up” like “Paperback Believer”, which uses the musical track of the Monkees “I’m a Believer” with the vocals from The Beatles “Paperback Writer”.

Probably the best-known of the recent mash-up’s is the notorious “Grey Album” by Dangermouse, which mixed Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with The Beatles “White Album”. In February, when the record label EMI overreacted and blocked distribution of “The Grey Album” it pretty much created an instant hit.

And earlier this year, David Bowie had a contest in which he asked fans to create a new song using computer music software to blend or “mash up” two existing tracks – with the winner winning a car!

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Mixmaster Mike- photo by Chris Taylor

Image source: Virtual DJ

Text source: Manovich.net 

winter 2007

It is a truism today that we live in a “remix culture.” Today, many of cultural and lifestyle arenas – music, fashion, design, art, web applications, user created media, food – are governed by remixes, fusions, collages, or mash-ups. If post-modernism defined 1980s, remix definitely dominates 2000s, and it will probably continue to rule the next decade as well. (For an expanding resource on remix culture, visit remixtheory.net by Eduardo Navas.) Here are just a few examples of how remix continues to expand. In his 2004/2005-winter collection John Galliano (a fashion designer for the house of Dior) mixed vagabond look, Yemenite traditions, East-European motifs, and other sources that he collects during his extensive travels around the world. DJ Spooky created a feature-length remix of D.W. Griffith’s 1912 “Birth of a Nation” which he appropriately named “Rebirth of a Nation.” In April 2006 Annenberg Center at University of Southern California ran a two-day conference on “Networked Politics” which had sessions and presentations about a variety of remix cultures on the Web: political remix videos, anime music videos, machinima, alternative news, infrastructure hacks.[1] In addition to these cultures that remix media content, we also have a growing number of software applications that remix data – so called software “mash-ups.” Wikipedia defines a mash-up as “a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.”[2] At the moment of this writing (February 4, 2007), the web site www.programmableweb.com listed the total of 1511 mash-ups, and it estimated that the average of 3 new mash-ups Web applications are being published every day.[3]

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Image and text source: bootieblog

Around the 15th of every month, Adrian & the Mysterious D — also known in the bootleg community as A plus D — pick ten of their current favorite mashups. Many of these are recent releases, while others may be forgotten favorites or great bootlegs that fell through the cracks. This list is highly-opinionated, and listed in alphabetical order by bootlegger

Bootie Blog

A plus D – Standing In The Way of Connection (The Gossip vs. Elastica) – San Francisco

Copycat – I Feel Love Is A Stranger (Eurythmics vs. Donna Summer) – Sweden

Dustria – The Kick Push Eple (Lupe Fiasco vs Royksopp) – Belgium

DJ Earworm – Funky Goes To Hollywood (Wild Cherry vs. Frankie Goes To Hollywood) – San Francisco BOOTIE EXCLUSIVE!

DJ Moule – Sympathy For Teen Spirit (Rolling Stones vs. Queen vs. Nirvana) – Bordeaux, France

Party Ben – Every Car You Chase (Snow Patrol vs. The Police) – San Francisco BOOTIE EXCLUSIVE!

DJ Schmolli – Upgrade The Casbah (The Clash vs. Beyoncé vs. Nelly Furtado vs. Ofra Haza) – Vienna, Austria BOOTIE EXCLUSIVE!

team9 – When You Were Starlight (The Killers vs. Muse) – Perth, Australia

Voicedude – Four Twenty (Luniz vs. Tom Petty vs. Cam Farrar vs. Afroman) – Orange County, USA

Wax Audio – Stayin’ Alive In The Wall (Pink Floyd vs. The BeeGees) – Sydney, Australia

Image source: Wired Archive

Text source: businessweek.com

JULY 25, 2005

Looking for a place to live last year, Paul Rademacher pored over Silicon Valley rentals on craigslist, the popular online classified-ad site. But the 3D-software engineer grew frustrated that he couldn’t see the properties’ locations on one map. So Rademacher hacked his own solution — a Web site that combines craigslist rentals with search engine Google Inc.’s (GOOG ) map service. The listings on HousingMaps.com appear as virtual pushpins on maps of nearly three-dozen regions around the country. Click on one, and up pop the details. Since its public debut in April, the free site has drawn well over a half-million unique visitors.

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Text source:  Spotlight 2.0
November 25, 2006

In these days it’s trendy to collaborate, share data and information over the Web. It seems to me like the Web has quickly morphed into a giant global operating system which allows to remix the Web via mash ups.

Over a period of nearly two years I posted more than 200 entries on my personal blog. The increasing amount of posts made it necessary to apply new ways to look up existing entries and to extract information quickly with precision.

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Image and text: Slate
Nov. 9, 2004

CD coverThe rise of the mash-up and of easy, cheap sound-processing software means that remixes—especially hip-hop remixes—are all over the Web. There are dozens of homemade, online remixes of Jay-Z’s The Black Album alone. The concept has even migrated to literature, images, comic books, and beverages—Coca-Cola is now issuing an annual “remix” flavor of Sprite.

But as pop culture has merged with remix culture, the literal remixes of alternative pop that brought the idea to the public have gradually been vanishing from record stores. So, there’s something funereal about Depeche Mode’s new three-disc Remixes 81-04 (Mute/Reprise—there’s also a one-disc condensation). The British new wave group has been inactive for almost four years, and even if it hasn’t quite broken up, the dates on the new collection might as well be engraved on a tombstone: Depeche Mode were present at the beginning of the synth-pop remix era in the early ’80s and rode it to success a few years later, and now they’re eulogizing its end.

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Image source: DJ Food

Text source Boing Boing

October 5, 2005

This is a 40-minute MP3 of a British radio broadcast called “DJ Food – Raiding the 20th Century” that attempted to sum up the entire cut-up/remix/mash up music movement. It’s lots of crazy, whacky, jarring, harmonious, tricksy, and serendipitous sound, and it made me laugh and think. The landing page for the MP3 has an exhaustive list of the samples employed.

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Image source: Pipes.yahoo.com

Text source: BBC

January 19, 2007

Pipes allows a mash-up of web 2.0 sites

The way we use the web is changing and the future lies in mixing, mash-ups and pipes, says columnist Bill Thompson.

When the web was young we were happy just to see words and pictures on the screen in front of us.

All backgrounds were grey, all fonts were Times and anything other than a static image required a “helper application” to be loaded and run, so that video clips and sounds played in separate windows on screen.

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