The fight for diverse and conscious voices

Here are some of the long-form pieces I've been listening to. Like most mixes they tend to have better and worse bits. All are worth the time it takes to stream them, though. I'm on my third or fourth listen to a couple.

http://simoniddol.com/post/20477014610/simon-iddol-spring-mix-download-01-the
Simon Iddol, the main force behind AudioPorn Central, puts out a big mix 2-4 times a year. This is his spring mix and as such it's lighter and very up-tempo. The overall feel is electro-disco and it includes a lot of instrumental segments, which makes it ideal background music for just about anything. It's got a jazzy feel and I adore him for choosing that first track.

http://www.themashupradio.com/2012/03/01/mashup-culture-the-album/
Mashup Radio has put together a massive collection of mashups that it's just calling "Mashup Culture". On the linked page you can listen to/watch half a dozen of the tracks. If you like those, there's a link to download the entire thing as a big ZIP file.

http://audioporncentral.com/2012/03/chromatics-kill-for-love-full-album-stream.html
Chromatics' "Kill For Love" full album stream. It starts off with the arresting Neil Young cover I mentioned in part 1. The rest is similar, but original, material. It's mellow, electro-disco stuff with heavy noire and light jazz influences. It's the kind of thing I would expect to be the soundtrack to a future dark and smoky club, if that makes any sense to you.

http://audioporncentral.com/2012/04/made-in-iceland-v.html
IMX brings us the latest "Made in Iceland" compilation. For such a tiny country they appear to have quite a lot of musical talent. There's a contribution from Gusgus, who have gotten some pop-radio airplay in the US, but the rest of the names are not known to me. The style of this connection seems to favor strong, often breathy, female vocals over spare arrangements, often with unconventional time signatures. I particularly like the Gusgus track - it's strong electronica.

OK, that's a bad joke. Some of this is new and some is older stuff I just found. Also, I'm listening to some so-called "nu disco" about which more in a future blog, I expect.

http://audioporncentral.com/2011/08/audioporn-central-on-big-city-beats-%E2%80%93-august-show-hosted-by-simon-iddol.html
APC did another of their multi-hour shows on Big City Beats. Quite a lot of good listening in here. The first part is a recap of a dozen of the remixes that appeared on APC in the past month. There's then an interlude of live mashing by Simon Iddol himself, but the best part is the last third, which is Copycat doing a live set with a bunch of his favorite mashes from the past few months. Copycat's style is hip and lively with a heavy dash of tribal and rhythm, making a good couple hours of listening.

http://official.fm/tracks/293550#
Ruinmytune, which appears to be another name for Pheugoo, puts together a nice bounce mix. Given that it's built in part with Rozalla's "Everybody’s Free"(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YgAw1G-4zY) which is one of my favorite vocal trance tracks. Pheugoo takes out the vocals, dropping the cheesy electronica in favor of a double dose of Calvin Harris's "Bounce" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooZwmeUfuXg). Kelis's vocals on the original Bounce are good, but I like the Rozalla/Harris combo better.

http://soundcloud.com/madmixmustang/holiday-of-choice
This mix is about a year old and I thought I had blogged it, but apparently not. Madmixmustang remixes two classics - Fatboy Slim's "Weapon of Choice" which gets remixed all the time - and Dead Kennedys' "Holiday in Cambodia". I don't think I've ever come across a DKs remix before and this one is insanely catchy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9qW6HEBo_c
Norwegian Recycling (http://norwegianrecycling.net) is a guy with a talent for multi-track mashing. He eschews the simple A/B pairings in favor of blending 4 or more related tracks into a new thing entirely. The YouTube page has a bunch of links to his stuff. Some of the more interesting pieces - like the "Don’t Stop Believin" currently on his site's home page - have almost conventional song structures, sometimes the same structures as one of the original pieces. As such they are less like the megamixes done by Lobsterdust and more like traditional pop songs.

http://marcjohnce.wordpress.com/2010/10/16/flex-gym-duck/
Another one from about a year ago, Marc Johnce taking the then-popular "Duck Sauce" and Dizzee's "Flex" and putting together a remix workout song with Ray Krebbs' "The Gym". I've always thought Duck Sauce made more sense as backing track than as a stand-alone and Dizzee can rap above most anything.

http://djsteveboy.com/groovelectric.html
DJ Steveboy's latest mix is "Downhome" and it's a nice blend of bluesy, funky, and danceable tunes. Lots of good phat horns.

No Art of Noise this time. I promise, soon. However, APC published some _awesome_ stuff this week that I want to share with you. First up, another video story...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkx9vxu4UW8&feature=player_embedded
A couple weeks ago I pointed to You Say Party in particular their video for "Lonely Lunch" which told an sf-nal story with the song as soundtrack. Now comes WAX TAILOR feat Charlotte Savary with "Dragon Chasers", which is a brilliant bit of noire down-tempo sound and video. Like all good noire, it's dark and mysterious and gets by less on action than on the way people _look_ at each other and things. Also, nice nods to the graphic novel form.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/11/simon-iddol-fogashaz-minimix.html
Simon Iddol did a little five-track minimix to promote a party in Budapest that he was DJing. The track list is there and all are pretty rocking. I have a problem listening to Jay-Z's "99 Problems", but the rest of the mix is good, with some really brilliant combinations including two surprising Beatles remixes. I guess getting their stuff on iTunes means we'll hear more Beatles mash-ups in the coming months.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/11/the-good-natured-be-my-animal.html
Another original+remix pairing, but this time I'll take the original over the remix. The song "Be My Animal" is by The Good Natured (http://www.facebook.com/thegoodnatured) and part of what makes it pleasing to my ear is the way the lead vocalist, Sarah McIntosh, is featured. She's got a potentially powerful voice, and though it's a bit too autotuned and clipped here, you get the sense she's got some power to show off. The remix loses a lot of her vocals; it's not bad on its own - just not as good.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/11/illegal-sunday-lobsterdust-down-unda-club-vj-brewski-video.html
I can't remember if I blogged DJ Lobsterdust's amusing mash of Men At Work vs 50 Cent before. The mix is a couple years old, but it's gotten a new video treatment, so it's worth a (re)visit.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/11/illegal-sunday-mixtape-caveirao-dance-1-2.html
It's been a long time since Bootie was good. It's been nearly forever since they were this AWESOME. These are two hour-long dance mixes that contain more clever blends and neat mashes than you can shake a stick at. I started playing this and narrating some of the great combos for MizA who eventually got enough time to play the mixes and started naming combos back to me. It's a blast. Sadly there's no tracklist I can find to verify against.

It's been a while since I posted any music so I've got a bucket of open tabs. What follows is a sampling of the most awesome stuff in a while.

http://soundcloud.com/kleptones/a-night-at-the-hip-hopera
This is an hour and eighteen minutes of concentrated AWESOME. It's a huge flashback to things that were popular - and being remixed - in 2004 when the set was put together. There's a heavy helping of 90s and 80s favorites and some of the best hip-hop from the first part of the decade. The Kleptones have been brilliant for longer than I realized.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/divide-kreate-tarzan-gurls.html
There's this notion of a "summer song" that's hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. Generally it's up-tempo, not too fast, and just bouncy enough you won't get in trouble blaring it out speakers next to your beach towel. Here Divide and Kreate (http://divideandkreate.com/) give us one such tune by mashing up Katy Perry's "California Gurls" with Baltimora's "Tarzan Boy". Katy Perry's tune was already listed on Billboard's "Songs of the Summer" chart (http://www.mtv.com/videos/katy-perry/527631/california-gurls.jhtml) and what Divide & Kreate has done is keep the essential female vocal from Perry and laid it over the electronica and boy-band backing sounds of Baltimora's one-hit wonder (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_r0n9Dv6XnY).

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/dj-fresh-gold-dust.html
Also in the summer-sound category, but in a very different way, is DJ Fresh's "Gold Dust." Where the first one was very white and beach, this one is black and inner-city playground. You absolutely MUST watch the video for this - it features some of the most amazing double-dutch I've seen in a long time. How Fresh (http://www.myspace.com/freshbadcompany) who is himself a white boy from the UK, managed to put this together is beyond me.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/07/superiddol-superman-simon-iddol.html
At last something new from Simon Iddol himself. Well, it's not precisely new - all the tracks in this mix are ones I've heard before. Iddol and a friend who DJs as Superman put this five-track sampler together as a promo for their July shows. It's a blast!

http://www.rhythmscholar.com/
Once upon a time the legendary Fatboy Slim teamed up with Christopher Walken to make a video for "Weapon of Choice." The video showed off Walken's dancing skills - he's no Fred Astaire but he was pretty damned good. Recently someone pointed me to a remix not just of the song, but of the accompanying video. The video was done by someone calling himself gfxdave99 (http://www.youtube.com/user/gfxdave99) to match a mix of the song done by Rhythm Scholar - a Chicago-area DJ. Well, if you're looking at the Scholar's page in another tab (as you should be) you can see he's got six different mixes of just this one tune. All the mixes are good, provided you don't object strenuously to scratch-dub.

And below that, my kind of music heaven. A dozen funky mixes of old favorites. Everything from Tom Tom Club to (gods help us) Billy Squier, with side trips into The Fixx, Red Hot Chili Peppers and, of course, Queen. The mix style tends to be somewhat similar from mix to mix - scratch/stutter, some beat-shifting, lots of sampling, and some very clever layering. Plus phat horns and funky extra bonus bits.

I particularly fell in love with his Art of Noise remix. I'm a long-time AoN fan(*) to begin with, and nobody remixes AoN. They've remixed themselves several times, but their sound is generally too odd and experimental for most folk. Rhythm Scholar does an amazing job blending together at least 8 different AoN tunes that I could identify, sampling stuff from their very early days to more recent pieces.

(*) Back in the days when music came on things called "records" that were made of "vinyl" I used to be an impoverished college student. Which meant I couldn't afford new records. I used to ride my bike down to Philly two or three times a month and pick over the really cheap offerings in the used record stores down there. The place was on South Street, near Zipperhead, back when that part of town was punk and slightly edgy, which it most certainly is not these days. I once saw Siouxsie and the Banshees doing promo songs from the back of a stripped down flatbed trailer truck down there. But I digress...

Anyway, one of those days I'm pawing through the bins and I realize that there's something different playing from the store's speakers. It's nohow like the usual 80s pop. It's kind of oddly clashing... and it appears to feature chainsaws. But it's got a beat. Ah yes, that beat. I abandon any of my usual youthful pretense of being hip and hurry up to the counter. What the heck is that? It's The Art of Noise, "Beatbox" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCyGdk23KNU). The clerk, who doesn't have to pretend to be hip, motions me to be quiet and just listen. Which I do. And then I buy out every AoN record he has in the store, undergrad student budget be damned.

Once upon a time, record stores had clerks who Knew Things. Their jobs let them listen to music all day long and pass judgment on the good, the bad, and the things that were so good everyone ought to know about them but nobody did. When I blog about music I feel like I'm paying back a little of what I got from people like that unnamed clerk in that South Street record store.

Ha, meeting postponed means you get more music links. Thank the schedule gods.

http://www.mashup-industries.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=284&Itemid=27
I'm sure I've mentioned before how much of a breath of fresh air I found Joan Jett to be when she first became popular - I can only hope that The Runaways (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1017451/) causes more people to (re)discover her. Her top-charting hit "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" gets an extra-length treatment here from DJ Schmolli, who mashes it up with a bouncy Crookers track (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD8biWtl1FI) that Junkie XL has remixed.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/04/illegal-sunday-dunproofin-rvst.html
As MizA said when she saw this, "Why Miss Rihanna, you're looking very LACED this evening." Yum. Yes, it's another "Rude Boy" mix and I have no idea who Tinie Tempah is but I like the way Dunproofin' is playing the two off each other. Dunproofin' does a lot of trainwreck mixes, which I generally don't like, and this one comes perilously close near the end but I think he pulls it out. Also, lacing!

http://audioporncentral.com/2009/11/simon-iddol-sad-mix.html
Simon Iddol posted this "Sad Mix" a while back. It's not a mix of sad tracks; rather it's something he put together when he was feeling sad to cheer himself up. There are five tracks here, four of which are already remixed and Iddol just sort of weaves them together to make a set that'll pick you up on some really blue day, I promise.

http://rcrdlbl.com/artists/William_Fitzsimmons/track/So_This_Is_Goodbye_Pink_Ganter_Remix
Speaking of sad music that isn't really sad, I'm still not sure what all to make of William Fitzsimmons (http://myspace.com/williamfitzsimmons). At one level he's a folkie-styling guy with a guitar. He's got decent licks and a very nice voice. But, remixes! With ambient and trance influences! It's smooth and pleasant listening with a beat. Also, the female vocal bits are particularly beautiful.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/04/lcd-soundsystem-%E2%80%93-bye-bye-bayou-turbotito-remix.html
LCD Soundsystem (http://www.lcdsoundsystem.com/) gives up an extra-cool electro-rave tune. It's got basic house beats and trippy vocals but a second rhythm layer makes this more of a drive/dance mix than you'd expect initially. This is the sort of thing I like to have on the car sound system when I have a lot of miles to cover.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/04/robyn-fembot-live.html
http://audioporncentral.com/2009/12/i-blame-coco-ft-robyn-caesar.html
http://audioporncentral.com/2010/01/i-blame-coco-ft-robyn-caesar-miike-snow-and-diplo-remixes.html
Robyn (http://www.robyn.com/#) is a far too white, far too cute and poppy of a singer chick to be producing these funky sounds. This is no Ace of Bass, trust me (also, she's way hotter). Robyn's been around for a while, doing more standard pop things, so I was wondering where I'd heard her voice before when I realized she'd been the featured backup singer with Coco Sumner (http://www.myspace.com/iblamecoco) on Coco's release earlier this year of "Caesar". And for extra-bonus coolness, Coco released not only the original track but two remixes - one by Diplo and one by Miike Snow. I love these side-by-side remixes; it's a kind of dueling turntables, giving you a feel for how very different two DJ styles can make the same base track sound.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/04/simon-iddol-dirty-like-dat-the-young-punx-vs-michael-jackson.html
http://audioporncentral.com/mashedpoppedpunked
http://audioporncentral.com/2010/04/simon-iddol-%E2%80%93-infinity-sunset-mix.html
Simon Iddol is the force behind APC and he's such a prolific blogger that it's easy to forget that he also does his own projects. Here we get a full-on dose of some of his best.

The umbrella project here is called The Young Punx (http://www.theyoungpunx.com/site/) and it features some of Europe's best young DJs, producers, and remixers doing their thing live and available for download. There are literally hundreds of MB available for free download at the site and if you like what you hear you can buy more through Amazon and iTunes. The new album is called MASHED POPPED PUNKED and it has 12 tracks of The Young Punx vs everyone else from Vangelis to the Pixies to opera. Yes, really. Some of the Young Punx names will be familiar if you read my music entries - lobsterdust and schmolli for example - and other names are new to me.

Finally, the third link is to a four-track set on Soundcloud that Iddol put together. It's very Euro-pop and much lighter than the Young Punx tracks.

Last time I said I would review the Bootie Blog Top 10 for February. Here's my review: it sucks. Skip it. Too much Gaga and Ke$ha who, as I said to MizA, bears approximately the same resemblance to good music as a K-Mart plastic tube with a lightbulb in it bears a resemblance to a real light saber. Even when they're nodding to The Kleptones they picked one of the worst bits of Uptime to link.

In replacement of which, I give you
http://www.kleptones.com/blog/2010/02/10/video-violence/
The first entry in The Kleptone's "Videotones project", an invitation to video mash-up artists to produce visual materials that go along with Uptime/Downtime. This piece by Instamatic renders out the "Welcome Back" mash that they built around Def Leppard's "Welcome To the Jungle".

http://djsteveboy.com/groovelectric.html
Also back in excellent form (finally) is DJ Steveboy with his latest stream titled "New Ground." He's moved up north to the SF Bay area and clearly the name is a tip of the hat to the new studio he has set up. The start is a bit slow, but it's got plenty of good funky stuff and the ending of the mix is some of his best work in a long time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3stsDXki__U&feature=fvw
OK, I'm probably the only one here who doesn't watch the Grammys. So you've probably all seen and heard this performance already. But I hadn't. If I ever said anything bad about P!nk I take it all back. This piece combines great vocals with excellent costuming and fabulous staging. Yes, it's true she's not doing all that difficult a silks bit. But who the hell cares - she's doing it herself, and singing at the same time. Smokin'. Also, I could point a finger about half a hundred performers who should study that costume for pointers. H/T to heinleinfan for the link.

http://audioporncentral.com/2010/02/simon-iddol-we-are-in-the-go-go-club.html
APC's Simon Iddol hasn't posted anything of his own in a while and I've missed his particular style. Here he's got Empire of the Sun's "We are the People" going up against Vybz Kartel's "Go-Go Club" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1YjnfU8xcc). Iddol has stripped out the reggae vocals of the latter but kept the dub clicks and bumps. It's a neat combination.

http://www.mashup-industries.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=38&Itemid=36
Mashup Industries changed its site organization and along the way linked to a video for this track, which Clivester did back in 2007. The vid is OK, but the track is... haunting. You'd think it was a Beatles mash, and it sort of is, but some of the real chills come from Erik B and Rakim's contributions, and strategically chosen samples from Duran Duran's "Come Undone" (http://www.tsrocks.com/d/duran_duran_texts/come_undone.html)