Just heard this on Do or DIY’s latest podcast which as usual is amazing and wonderful *shelves current podcast and starts again * and it’s great to hear some new music from Kevin Blechdom (of Bastard fave cover ‘I Will Always Love You’ with Dsico), also reunited with Blevin Blechtum as Blechtum from Blechtum where it all began (or bleched?). Watch for a whole load of beautiful blechdumb.

They both deserve to be a lot more known…amazing that the US creates wonderfully quirky electronic musicians and experimental musicians which actually have wider appeal, and mostly they get ignored at home unless they’re hipsters like Animal Collective, MTV like Devo or just MEH like Girl Talk (thinking people like Matmos, Negativland, Residents, ECC, Cex, Venetian Snares – ok he rarely has wide appeal, Chicks on Speed hey they’re nearly all in SF/Bay Area…or had to move to Europe. Hmmm.).

I’m guessing unless the quirks fit into some branding strategy the US media and music industry will want to lop them off, whereas here the quirks and non-homogeneity is what makes it cool.

Anyway enough ranting and more blech:

Love the plants and beekeeper masks, LOL.

Don’t believe a lot of what you read here.

It’s just wrong. Maybe it has been edited by a few people to self promote; all respect to those people, but they arrived a bit later. Doesn’t it strike you as odd, when the page actually mentions GYBO and Boomselection started in 2001/2002 all the ‘notable’ dates are from 2004/5 on? So apparently we all sat on our hands for 2-3 years doing nothing? Probably posting lolcats and bitching about Weiser/IDC LOL.

I added the first mashup albums/compilations (Parkspliced, I Created A Monster, London Booted – some of the first to mash up a whole album) a while back and they’ve been removed. Why? Well probably cos the wikitrolls and wikimods use Google as a primary source. Extremely sad – but why you should NEVER use Wikipedia as a primary source. Ever. It has some rather glaring omissions/wrongness:

• No Frenchbloke & Son? Esp in Bootleg Albums – no Haggis Trax (1999 apparently, not 2002! Played on JOHN PEEL FFS)
• No Fondue Meltdown?
• No Soundhog?
• No Erol Alkan / Kurtis Rush?
• No Strictly Kev? No DJ Food?
• No Coldcut – they’re rather important re: mashups…Beats and Pieces was seminal as well as the KLF
• Your Woman by Whitetown as good as it is, is NOT a mashup. It has no recognisable 2nd ‘B’ element?
• No Cartel Communique – well Bastard is sort of mentioned…in passing, sad for this is the first ever mashup club, the one that influenced Bootie. So why is it passed over, with a small image credit?
• Soulwax created Blue Monday vs Kylie – really? LOL (it was actually Erol Alkan as Kurtis Rush, Soulwax remade it)
• No mention of how DJ Hero actually started at Bastard?
• Never ever heard of Bonna Music, Good Copy Bad Copy (self promo?), WTF is Glee doing there?, White Panda – WHO?, Max Tannone – ditto, never heard of you, Tom Caruana – ??? and Clayton Counts should probably not be there either – the latter was just doing it as a stunt like his rather sick ‘death’. ‘Punkmash’ != mash.
• Why is Girl Talk on there since he’s said he’s not a mashup artist?
• Love you ToTom but why is there a separate section for your work and GHP and Freelance Hellraiser doesn’t? Or Soundhog or Frenchbloke or Fondue Meltdown or…
• Ditto Legion of Doom – you’re a precursor cos you started doing mashups in 2004? Really? Err…

OTOH, nice to see Phil n’ Dog’s Doctor Pressure getting rather belated props…

As an aside, I heard from John that one of the editor of  an influential 70′s gay rights magazine added it to Wikipedia cos it wasn’t there – to be deleted by some Wikitroll. Why? Well apparently it ‘didn’t have enough Google hits’. *facepalm*

Of course! If  it isn’t on Google it doesn’t exist! I mean it’s not like there is a massive pre-history of the world that hasn’t been digitised yet…oh. And this is recent history that thinks mashups started in 2004/2005 – it’s far worse for say the history of Gay Rights and GLF. Distortion for personal gain of near and nearish history is very common.

Oh and response to those who’ll helpfully say: ‘why don’t you edit it then?’ – I did that for many years correcting the mistakes, they all get reverted back to wrong/self promo/recent stuff. So maybe you should have a go (enough people repeatedly doing it might get the message across). Go to it gang!

Other response might be: ‘who gives a fuck about history’ - well it’s a lucrative & powerful position to write it. Such gatekeepers get appearance fees, book deals and lazy journalists apply them with ‘expert’ status firming up their position and their ‘idea’ of history. It then gets written down as ‘the truth’ til many years later – if ever – someone actually bothers to question it, but by then the damage is done. But recent events have shown it’s worryingly about who shouts the loudest, who shouts longest, and public perception rather than any idea of truth (which I know is subjective, but to abandon any ideal of objective truth even if it is an impossible goal, but an important journey, is worrying).

And no I wasn’t adding Radio Clash – someone did that years ago and it stayed for a while*, ironically when I’d stopped playing purely mashups…more adding those who should be remembered and never were (part of the remit of Radio Clash and the mashup history series, it has to be said – must resurrect the Mashup History because otherwise this will be forgotten and people will think Glee invented mashups LOL).

*It then got removed as teh Wikitroll said apparently podcasts have nothing to do with mashups…okaaaay. Never reappeared on the podcasting page. Being one of the first (I lose count of whether I’m 2nd, 3rd or 4th – not bothered about the ranking, tbh) podcasts in the UK doesn’t count for much it seems

Shiny new post on a shiny new host, and something that’s been in my torrent download queue for ages – the film Steal This Film II – a great freely downloadable documentary about file sharing, information sharing in cultures (like teaching) and the social and legal issues within and looking at past technologies like the printing press and how a ‘pirate culture’ helped the French Revolution along.

It’s made by and for the people on the side of angels ie. the pirates so you won’t get a totally ‘balanced view’ (which usually means one biased to the mainstream media and corporates) but the MPAA and heads of Hollywood do get their say and their arguments countered. The strongest impression you get from this is how this struggle of information freedom and ‘piracy’ has been going on a very long time and is constantly on going; how the real fear of the major corporates is probably that the audience becomes the creators and cuts them totally out of the loop, and that the file sharing wars are pretty much lost despite setbacks after this film was made (Pirate Bay and the like).

It’s also much better than Steal This Film I which was a bit of a mish-mash (and out of focus in parts – ouch). Apparently they are expanding both bits into a full film, and then going for a release, which I’m hoping is still officially torrented, unlike RiP: A Remix Manifesto‘ which although very professional looking and interesting sadly seems to be going through the age-old Hollywood distributor/release model – requires different release dates for different world areas (apparently I can’t download it cos I’m ‘not in the US’ – DOH – no release dates for the UK either). Given the subject of that film, it is rather ironic – it may be about remix or online culture in the 21st century but that particular medium is most definitely not the message. Maybe it’s because the film is evolving they’re not officially torrenting it (someone else has put up an unnofficial torrent).

Anyway it has Girl Talk in it, in fact so much the whole film is basically a Girl Talk promo, and y’all know how I feel about him. The Brazil bits showing baile funk are really good, and Cory and Lessig are always brilliant, but it pretty much covers the same areas as Steal This Film I and II, but with more flashy animations/production.

It does have this great funny remix at the end pulled from YouTube seemingly uncredited, but I recognised the Eclectic Method logo:

For those wanting to get into the issues around musical remix/cutup I’d rather recommend Sonic Outlaws by Craig Baldwin, which was created about 15 years earlier and covers the same ground sans some of the later ‘Napster/bittorrent’ stuff covered in STF, some of the footage by/of Negativland is used in ‘RiP’! At the very least you then won’t need to look at a naked Greg Gillis…:-P

Anyway I think the model of Steal This Film and Sita Sings the Blues is the future though, torrenting your movie and letting the world see it in a donation model if they like it, or buying copies if they want them. To trot out my old phrase, they get it. They really do. Go support them.

Yes it’s finally here – 72, the pass-the-parcel mashup project, inspired by our very own Boot in 60 Seconds has reached 72 minutes and is thus finished!

This is basically what Girl Talk SHOULD sound like, done by people who actually understand mashups rather than spending more time on their haircut. Cue Girl Talk lovin’ haterz Bring it on! Anyway 72 has the same sort of 30 seconds-and-it’s-gone hyper-ritalin ADD and ‘remember this?’ nostalgia silliness and madness, but most of it by and large works far better than 99.999% of mixes in this genre.

Includes remixage from:

Lee Spoons, Instamatic (tis me!), World Famous Audio Hacker, Celebrity Murder Party, Eddie Pedalo, pomDeter, Irn Mnky, RadioFace, JamieCG74, GaraGara and MadMixMustang.

Each mashup artist had 72 hours to complete their section, and it features contributions by yours truly. Go give it love over at GYBO or download it here. Thanks to 10000 Spoons for hosting, Pomdeter for the idea and great artwork and Pom and Eddie Peddlecar for mix-wrangling and organising a great project!