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: beastiemania

Quick, what do these names have in common: the Prunes, Fatboy Slim, Large Professor, Prisoners of Technology, Prof D? If you guessed people who have remixed Beastie Boys songs, you would be correct. Huh? While you should be familiar with the first four names, the last and many other are evidence of the growing trend of fans becoming their very own mix masters.

Listen Everybody Cause I’m Shifting Gears I’m

In order to understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to travel back in time. Remixes used to be available in two ways, the most commercially available were B-Sides of a song released as a single. The Beastie Boys were especially prolific in the addition of numerous remixes and non album tracks to entice fans to purchase the single in addition to the album. This trend of including remixes began in the Paul’s Boutique era with the release of several remixes that were essentially dub versions of original songs such as And What You Give is What You Get, Dis Yourself in 89 (Just Do It) and 33% God.

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Image and text source: National Geographic

April 2007

Photographs by David Alan Harvey

Whether you trace it to New York’s South Bronx or the villages of West Africa, hip-hop has become the voice of a generation demanding to be heard.

This is my nightmare: My daughter comes home with a guy and says, “Dad, we’re getting married.” And he’s a rapper, with a mouthful of gold teeth, a do-rag on his head, muscles popping out his arms, and a thug attitude. And then the nightmare gets deeper, because before you know it, I’m hearing the pitter-patter of little feet, their offspring, cascading through my living room, cascading through my life, drowning me with the sound of my own hypocrisy, because when I was young, I was a knucklehead, too, hearing my own music, my own sounds. And so I curse the day I saw his face, which is a reflection of my own, and I rue the day I heard his name, because I realize to my horror that rap—music seemingly without melody, sensibility, instruments, verse, or harmony, music with no beginning, end, or middle, music that doesn’t even seem to be music—rules the world. It is no longer my world. It is his world. And I live in it. I live on a hip-hop planet.

Read the entire feature at National Geographic

Image source: http://www.descalzosporelparque.com

Text source: Slate

Posted Monday, July 29, 2002

CD coverThe debut of Jennifer Lopez’s J to Tha L-O! The Remixes at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart earlier this year was just another notch on the career bedpost for the multimedia Latina. But for the art of the remix, it was a milestone: the first time an album composed entirely of remixes hit No. 1 in the United States. Serendipitously enough, Lopez’s collection followed directly on the heels of her onetime beau P. Diddy’s We Invented the Remix—an album whose typically grandiose title, you won’t be surprised to hear, is so much hooey. We Reinvented the Remix as a Marketing Ploy would have been more accurate.

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Image and text source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/tx/
documentaries/remix.shtml

Date of publication, uncertain

1Xtra’s ‘Remix Kid’ Seani B uncovers the origins of remixing…
How has the art has changed over the years?

First developed by Jamaican reggae producers in the 1960s to create dub music, remixing was picked up by hip hop pioneers and disco DJs to develop new styles.

P Diddy is one the most famous remixers of all time – if that title is in your sights, listen up for Seani’s tips on how to put together your own remix track.
Who’s the remixer of the remixers? How has remixing blurred the boundaries between different musical genres in the UK?

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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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Text and Image source: Create Digital Music

March 20, 2007

The wireless, Bluetooth-based Wii controller is fast becoming the music control hardware of choice. The latest addition: Yann Seznec’s Wii Loop Machine, a free, Wii-controller looper for Macs. The software is built in Max/MSP using my current favorite way to interface with the Wii controllers, the free aka.wiiremote external for Max. Load in any samples you want, boot up any Mac with Bluetooth, grab your Wii controller, and you can sync, control, manipulate, and muck with loops.

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Image source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/
blogs/technology_news/2875526.html

Text source: NYTimes

February 22, 2007

WHAT do flying plastic pigs, dancing daisies and robotic Barbie dolls have in common? An iPod.
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Lars Klove for The New York Times

With more than 90 million players sold worldwide since its introduction in 2001, the iPod has spawned a lucrative accessories industry. At least 3,000 types of iPod extras have received Apple’s blessing — mostly no-nonsense options like cases, earbuds and amplified speaker systems, including the $300 SoundDock line made by Bose.

But another trend is developing, one more playful and not always with Apple’s approval or knowledge.

Call it iSilly, a growing number of products in which fun is emphasized over function, and cute or irreverent often trumps wow. All of these items, some costing as little as $10, have been created to plug into an iPod — or, in many cases, any audio source that has a standard 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.

Read the entire article

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: http://www.hypebeast.com/
Text source: International Herald Tribune

February 19, 2007

NEW YORK: MTV prospered for decades because it looked like what a network might look like if a 16- year-old were doing the programming.

But now the music channel is trying to make its way in a multidevice, multiplatform, multichannel world, most of which is being programmed by a 16- year-old.

The velocity of change has left MTV occasionally looking as if were being programmed by an 83-year-old — namely Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owns MTV. The network, itself a stately 25 years old, has suffered a decline in ratings and cultural cachet.

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