Phew this touring lark in this hot weather is a bind, lugging those stacks around and…WAIT A MINUTE YOU HAVEN’T BEEN ON TOUR. Well *I* haven’t but my naughty videos have and will be – not only were my videos for the Videotones project just shown last week at Glastonbury (did I mention it? LOL…) as part of the Kleptones set, I received word a few days ago via Simon Iddol that Young Punx want to use my video of dj BC‘s excellent and indeed unforgettable Unbelievable Juice and Gin on their tour. Of course I said yes and sent them over the file.

So Instamatic – coming to a venue near you. I quite like this lazy gigging lark, actually…

Strawberry and Pimms by Moogan – Creative Commons

As the St George flags magically melt away as they were never there in the first place, just like the hopes of the England fans, we can get back to drinking Pimms, Cricket, moaning about being crap at Wimbedon, killer urban crack foxes and random violent knife crime.

Oh and listening to the monster 3-disc Summer Booty 2010 – the new summer mashup compilation from a cast of millions arranged by DJ Useo – this year with added Instamatic

Not Pimms, but oh so sweet…and the fruit doesn’t get stuck in your teeth.

Can’t think of a clever thematic linking device apart from there is no mention of the World Cup or football in this po….DOH! Have an unrelated yet topical Chris Brown MAD cartoon mashup instead…

I should be so getting sick of Lady Gaga mashups by now, but no not yet. I was getting ready to hate Pomatic’s Thieves Like Romance Lady Gaga vs New Order mashup (well so few people do New Order justice, much abused in the mash world but rarely bettered) and was surprised to find out that’s it’s a total POP CHOON (Ian Act of Dog and Jeb 50 Pound Note please report to the front desk! beep!) mashing Thieves Like Us and Bad Romance to great effect.

In fact it’s part of a whole album ‘The Fame Monster Mash Hitz’ (title could be slightly better, C- see me!) and it’s pretty good – nothing here crossing genres or experimental like the last post but with tunes like Just Summer – Bananarama vs Lady Gaga (Cruel Summer vs Just Dance) it’s less about cred envelope-pushing and just recognising a good dancefloor-friendly totally pop mashup – which I remind you is quite hard to pull off well especially pure A vs B. And these two do that well – good summer pop mashups.

Unwanted Whisper by The Kleptones

Kleptones are off to several festies this year, including i_beta festival in the Netherlands and Glastonbury – and afore thee went they left us with a nice present, Unwanted Whisper a reversal mashup of their infamous Bootie track ‘Careless Or Dead’ – rather than using the George Michael instrumental this uses the acapella, and vice versa for the Jon Bon Jovi. Strange to hear this combo reversed, but it also works but in a less immediate way than Careless.

I have to say I don’t cover the artier/experimental side of mashups and cutup culture as much as I’d like to, but here’s definitely one release to make up for that – the second volume of Motown Meltdown. I loved the first volume ever since I heard it via Vicki People Like Us’s Do or DIY show and played a Blanketship track from it a couple of years ago.

This new volume carries on the humour and ambience of the first, the idea being that you can only use tracks from the Motown Masters Karaoke discs (yes you might have wondered where those many Motown mashups come from, well they released Karaoke discs made of the actual master tracks, that’s how!) and nothing else. The resulting Vol 2. goes from insane brokenbreaks glitch of Vytear to achingly sad tracks from Blanketship, to more hypnagogic drones from Beaks Plinth and manic cutups and loops of T H E M A Y S and Lord Tang. Definitely not Motown as you’ve heard it before!

My choices? Well ‘I Still Hate You…_ Lavender Dreams’ by Blanketship is definitely recommended as well as these two:

Since I Decided to Go by Rokhausen – a manic jive through the Motortown’s back catalogue, humorous and funky and mad. My kind of track – fuck art let’s dance

Qulfus – Three Times Twice – I have several factors for why I choose the music for the blog and podcast, one of them is definitely if it makes me laugh. This is probably some kind of profane sacrilege dissing The Lionel but I love the slowed down re-edit/retake of the Commodore’s ever-green (and admittedly slightly mouldy) classic. Brilliant

If you like download the whole album here.

Behold Dan Walsh’s genius Garfield minus Garfield; which is unusual in a whole  sea of C&D’s regarding derivative and transformative works of cartoon/comic characters is that Jim Davis is not only a fan but they did a book together. Very cool of Jim…as Dan points out the whole idea isn’t new, although the idea of deleting Garfield is new to me (previous works have changed or deleted Garfield’s responses (or all of them) or deleted Jon from the proceeds or added new characters).

I think this existential ‘Waiting for Garfield’ angst version of Garfield, while also funny in places is verging on art; the bathos and focusing on Jon’s mental state brings it into pop art territory in my mind. And also is perfect mashup territory being an excellent display of a transformative work where the original creator sees the value and humour in the new work, and not only is the new work allowed but both collaborate to make new ones with the book.

Contrast this with the war over Dysfunctional Family Circus.

Thanks to Solcofn for putting me onto G-G.

Oh and polka! Accordions! <3!