Lady Gaga x Deee-Lite: What Is Lovegame? (The Fame Cliqué Remix)

Kuts Thru You

Since yesterday the series of Youtube mash-ups of Israeli musician and artist Kutiman are spreading like wildfire through the net. The original Thru-You-site, where the videos are hosted is currently down, but some people have captured the clips and put them up on Youtube.

Kutiman takes small parts out of Youtube videos of amateur musicians and instrument presentations. He loops them and creates new songs out of the bits and pieces. It´s audio-visual sampling in its purest form and the results are simply amazing! The idea is not new but the artful and musical expertise with which it is done is stunning and very impressive.

"Babylon Band" gives a good impression on how the music and the video works.


"This is what it became", on a reggae tip


"Just a Lady" is just beautiful!


You can watch all seven videos and a short "how-it-was-done"-clip by Kutiman here.

The Annual Brit Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Pop-Excellence Goes To The Pet Shop Boys

A ten-minute medley (or potpourri as we used to say before the war) spawning the 25 year lasting career of the Pet Shop Boys was performed by the band at yesterdays BRIT AWARDS. PSB received an "Outstanding Contribution To Music Award" which justified this career mash-up.

In true PSB-fashion the show was a slightly odd and brittle performance of random imagery, unnecessary ballet, wacky wigs and Lady GaGa. All in all: A great success (minus the GaGa)

Explosure

Photographer Tierney Gearon is currently showing "Explosure" her series of double exposure photographs at Phillips de Pury Gallery in London.


According to the artist, the works were all shot and composed in camera.


As with many other double exposures the theme and feel of the resulting work is often one of nostalgia and recognition. Indifferent of his own memory and life, the viewer often feels to have been part of at least one part of the pictured scene.

To the Happy Few

"To the Happy Few" by Thomas Draschan, 2003

Description from Thomas Draschan´s Website
The film is structured around the mystical idea of the mandala, in this case pictures of(fake)suns, galaxies and planets. These images are in sync with an Indian Bollywood song to enhance the pseudo-psychedelic effects. The film material covers a very wide range of found footage from various sources and decades starting in the 1930s (invisible woman) until the end of the 1980s.

Hypnotic and amazing! (includes some NSFW bits)

Holy Explosions of Ecstasy

This is some of the most amazing shit I have seen recently! I was shocked and awed!

Expertly mashing drum ´n bass with footage of holy rollers freaking out in church aisles is a marriage made in heaven (or hell).

The editing in these "Baptazia"-videos is brilliant and more unsettling than the Cunningham/Aphex Twin video "Come To Daddy".

After about 23 seconds you will start speaking in tongues:


File under Speedgospel and Jesuscore:


This one is amazing for the great editing of the two "MCs". Just make sure to watch the moment at around 1:40. Absolutely insane!


POSSESSED! This is probably the sickest of the bunch:

Now: REWIND!

There are many more clips and I must admit that the vids get quite addictive. I must also admit that I am just a little bit envious that the church experience in my part of the world is...well, different. At least it was twenty years ago, the last time when I was dragged into a service.

Snip

One of the few really helpful tools that came with Vista (not Stella) is the Snipping Tool which allows you to copy a snippet from your screen and store it as a jpeg (or whatever you prefer).

This way you can easily capture fleeting images from flash-animations, movies or anything that doesn´t work with "save copy as".

Here are a some examples of frozen, unseen digital images from random, perpetual animations. (click to enlarge!)

Naked Lynch

Good or popular mash-ups have become quite rare after the scene retreated further into the underground or some producers went on to bigger, more legal things.

In this regard Mashed in Plastic came as a big, surprising bang! The idea to offer a full album mashing the dream-logic of David Lynch and the music of Angelo Badalamenti with other songs to create a consecutive listening experience could have easily turned into nightmare-logic.

There is always a big chunk of ambivalence in Lynch´s films and their reception.
Some say you either love or hate them, but I think this is not true. I´d say you can admire his strong sense for mood and obsessive imagery, be entertained by his craft and perverse meta-surrealism and still be annoyed by all of this at the very same time.


One positive thing about his films that almost everybody can agree on is the great use of music. The main compositions of Angelo Badalamenti and to a certain extent Lynch´s own work form a magical alliance with "borrowed" music and the moving images. (Although I never forgive him for allowing the dreadful Rammstein gaining international acclaim through the "Lost Highway"-Soundtrack)

Back to Mashed in Plastic. The whole project is remarkable for creating something that sounds like an interesting idea that is doomed to fail and turning it into a success on every level. The listening experience can be downloaded for free as a consecutive mix or as a package of individual songs.


Held together by Lynch´s own words, film dialogue and eerie sounds, the whole thing is highly complex, immaculately executed and challenging. As usual in this genre, not every song works perfectly, but when idea, ambition and craft do work, your jaw will drop and somebody might find it next to a severed ear in the front garden.

One should really listen to the whole experience in it´s entirety as it offers much more than it´s individual parts (be they good or bad).

There are a few of the usual acapella-suspects (Beatles, Kylie), some I usually avoid like the plague (Tori Amos) and some obvious from within the Lynch universe.

Highlights are the incredible "I´ll be there in Twin Peaks". Mashing the "Twin Peaks Theme", "Falling" with "I´ll be there" by Jackson 5 and some Leona Lewis. The effect is amazing and fits the season.

I´ll be there in Twin Peaks


Mashed in Plastic is much more than a listening experience. The presentation on the website is outstanding. There is a great mash-up photo to every song, extensive linernotes and -to top it all- there are videos to almost every song! These Youtube-videos will certainly guarantee that this project will receive a receptive audience beyond the mash-up scene.

In a way it is the definite "concept mash-up for grown-ups" and it might as well be the swan song for the genre. Anyway, it will be seen as a classic! Ear This!

Merging Todd Ford

Todd Ford´s paintings are a cross between photorealism and commercial art, which is both very much appreciated here at StellaVista Towers.

If you open his website you will be greeted by a slideshow which blends some of his paintings into one another for a brief moment. Since I was always fascinated by double- and super exposure, I could not help to grab screenshots of this one special moment when his paintings overlapped.






Of course, Todd´s work is great by itself and I could understand if he is not happy with the way I turned his art into "faux-art". Anyway, there is something about these "mash-ups" which I really like and since they appear on his site - even only for a fracture of a second by means of a widget - it gives way to lots of theories about art, it´s depiction and the possibilities of the receptor of toying around with it.



Todd also writes a blog which shows more of his art - at times on the easel but 100% un-merged.

Vogue On Vogue

"Here I am, vogueing pretty in some club deep in the city."

One year of international Vogue-covers superimposed into one image.

Watch while listening to Malcom Maclaren and Bootzilla Orchestra´s legendary Deep In Vogue, which rocked the world a long time before that Madonna woman stole the trend and claimed it as her idea.

Vogue France

Vogue UK

Vogue Russia

Vogue Korea

Vogue Japan

Vogue Italy

Vogue Germany

Vogue China

Vogue Brazil

Style!

Fashion stylist Devon Walker photographed by Altamira

I love how he manages to mix the look of Grace Jones, Kid ´n Play and Kim Jong Il without any trace of irony - and getting away with it.

Does Your Homosapien Know?

I know, I know...Mash-ups are so 2001 but this one is too great to miss.
It´s ABBA vs. Pete Shelley! The great and unforgettable Pete Shelley, who did some fantastic and energetic electro-rock-pop after he left seminal punk-band Buzzcocks.

Today, his first single (and album) Homosapien sounds as fresh and urgent as ever. The original video was pretty campy, but intercut with the Abba scenes, it gets kicked through the roof.

Bannded by the BBC for it´s pretty unhidden gay message in 1981, this is still a ball-kicker and should-be-anthem.

Charade

I actually planned to stay away from posting anything concerning the upcoming American election. After all, I am not a voter, not an American and absolutely nothing of intelligence on the subject remains to be said or unsaid.

I have to admit that I thought about posting a link to the mindboggling Mexican midget playing Sarah Palin (or Sharia Plan, as somebody has anagrammed her name).
I also liked the vintage Batobama-Poster with Biden as Robin and McCain-Palin as Joker and Catwoman. But I thought that this was only fleeting internet fodder, and there was no need for me to distribute it any further.

Today I saw this amazingly re-dubbed Golden Girls sketch and I couldn´t stop giggling. I also wondered that only 32.000 people had seen it during the last five weeks and so I decided that it could easily have two more views generated by me.
Watch it, it is a very creative and well done media manipulation. I dare to call it genius.

When Your Dream of Perfect Beauty Comes True

Music: "When your dream of perfect beauty comes true" by Bill Nelson, 1982
I don´t know where the video comes from, but it is probably twenty years younger than the song. It also hammers its message a bit too hard...still great.

Edit You Inside Out (EDIT)

Everything relates to everything!

DJ Cole Medina has done this fantastic re-edit of the Bee Gees "Love you inside out", which shows once more the wonderful enhancing power of good editing.
He does not really do all that much to the original. By looping some parts of the song endlessly, adding only counted delays and some start/stop drop-outs, he creates a delirious, blissed-out, float-boat of a song that could go on an on. Sadly it ends too abrupt, but it´s not an official release anyway.

update: somebody doesn´t like re-edits and wants it to be removed.


Let´s further the "re-edit theme": The original version of the song can be seen on Youtube as part of an experiment, exploring editing and composing!

The song -randomly chosen- plays over an un-edited excerpt of cinematic schlock-fest "C.H.U.D. - Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers". Now I know that some people will claim that this MAKES it a Bee Gees-video...But anyway...

The user, who did this mash-up, wanted to test and possibly disprove the theory that Pink Floyd composed one of their overrated albums to accompany "The Wizard of Oz".
It is great and has some brilliant moments, when film and music accidentally meet.
I learned from this video, what "Love you inside out" really means...

Other amazing things you can learn from the Youtube-comments is the fact that apparantly many people who look up the Bee Gees on Youtube think that John Goodman was quite sexy!

Posting stuff about the Bee Gees is always a welcome chance to wallow in their otherworldly beauty. So there...

Are they real?

Montague Terrace (in Blue)

...and we´ll dream, won´t we?!

On Sunday we were driving down "Powderface Trail", a Rocky Mountain-creek in Kananaskis County. The trail is curvy, undulating and offers great and surprising views. The soundtrack to this trip was an all-hits-no-fillers-mix of Scott Walker´s solo albums Scott 1-4

Just when you think there is no way you can see more rolling hills with millions of trees, or hear another crescendo with more whirling strings and over-the-top bariton crooning,...around the next corner there will be even more luscious landscapes and the music will take an even more dramatic turn...just to mock you!

The haunting images which accompany the beautiful Scott Walker song "Montague Terrace (in blue)" were taken after the big 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

I have no idea where this came from, but I am glad it´s there!

Casino Street corner Cyclops

Ernie Pesci and Bert DeNiro


And meanwhile in a German parallel universe:

Tonight is forever!

I love the idea of people being so into certain songs that they make their own, alternative videos. Sometimes its a cutting exercise that just needed some music, sometimes its a carefully edited montage that puts things into a new perspective, like the "Fly me to the moon" video I wrote about yesterday.

"Tonight is forever" uses a different, very simple approach to a stunning outcome. The author uses one of the great, early Pet Shop Boys songs "Tonight is forever" and plays it over an unedited excerpt of Godfrey Reggio´s "Koyaanisqatsi". Now, one of the things "Koyaansiqatsi" is famous for is the soundtrack by Philip Glass. The track that is used during the wonderful timelapse shots of Chicago(?) by night is called "The Grid" and is known for its relentless, minimal rhythms and melody fragments.



By replacing the original music, which is an essential part of the whole film, with the somehow elegic pop of the Pet Shop Boys, we see a non existing promo-clip to a non-existing single. The effect works so well, that many people on YouTube believed that this is actually an official release by the band. This is not surprising since PSB themselves let photographer Wolfgang Tillmans direct a video for "Home and dry", which shows nothing more than mice running around a London underground station. However, this concept is broken up with a 20 second scene of the band playing. As if some record company executive got cold feet at the last moment.

The song "Tonight is forever" appeared on the first Pet Shop Boys album "Please" in 1986.
It is somehow a "prototype" PSB song, as it uses imagery and the sentiment of rock music but turns it completly upside down by refusing to play to the rules of rock.
The thin, distant voice, nearly drained from emotions or a gender determination glorifies the decadence of nightlife while wishing to fall in love to be saved from it.
The elegic chords seem to slow down the driving disco beat, which cites the Hi-NRG era but also anticipates the upcoming house-sound that was about to dominate pop-music in the near future. There are also echos of italo-disco and the Bobby O. songs they wrote in the beginning of their career.

The overall feel of the song - despite its easy going positivity - is sad and there is a strong sense of loss. The singer is undecided and passive. He "could be wrong", he "could be right", he doesn´t work and is content with going out every night. He is waiting for somebody else who "holds the key" and "opens the door", so that things will never change but without staying the same.
These metaphors are actually pulled from the bottom drawer of pop-cliches and are begging for cheap laughs. However, as soon as Neil Tennant claims that "I don´t think of the future tonight", nobody is laughing anymore!

It was the height of the AIDS crisis and the carefree hedonism of the seventies disco-era was gone. While pop music was all the rage during this time, dance music was in a stage of transition. Italo and Hi-NRG was more or less over, (acid)-house had not yet arrived.
Clubmusic was dark and agressive. It was the time of Electronic Body Music (EBM) , Industrial and Gothic.
The urban melancholy of "Tonight is forever" really stands on its own. It is a timeless pop song that, despite its 80´s production values, still triggers strong emotions today.

As with so many PSB songs of this era, supressed or alledged homosexuality always looms under the surface.
This theme is often recurring in Tennants lyrics of that time: "Two divided by zero" suggests that "someone started a rumour" about the protagonist and his partner and they decide to run away before the news spread.
It´s one of the best "escape" songs ever: "We´ll catch a plane to New York and a cab going down across the bridges and tunnels, straight into town. Tomorrow morning we´ll be miles away, on another continent on another day."
Of course the "rumour" could be anything, but gay listeners immediately got the message.

The titles of some of the b-sides are even less cryptic: "I bet she´s not your girlfriend" and "It must be obvious" are nearly giving it all away. But then the ambivalence of the lyrics are shying away from a real statement.

Before "Very" which was sort of an "official coming-out" album, the lyrics of the Pet Shop Boys were much more satisfying, because they had more poignancy and were open to interpretation. After the masterpiece that was "Behaviour" and their finest hour "Being Boring", they made sure that the message of "Go West" was clear to everybody.

But instead of the over the top campness of their Village People cover, i could listen to "Tonight is forever" over and over while gazing at the detached time-lapse of the city at night. Thinking about the time when I was actually going home from the clubs while everybody else was going to work. The time when you were really living for the night, and when you knew - deep inside - that all this was just a passing phase. But for the moment you accepted that your life would go on like this. For ever and ever.

Fly me to the moon

This is another reason why Youtube is the best thing since the invention of chocolate.
I was actually looking for Julie London on Youtube, but there was not much to find, apart from a sensational b/w live appearance in Japan, which cannot be embedded. So I came across this selfmade mash-up. Its made out of footage from "Barbarella" and "2001" set to Julie´s wonderful rendition of "Fly me to the moon". It´s really, really good!

The sexy future fun of Barbarella versus Kubrick´s underlying message that the future will be boring, combined with the sultry space escapism of the well known pop standard is a great companion to todays J.G. Ballard-Quote: "Sex times technology equals the future".

Here is the link to "Julie in Japan". It will melt you!
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=1U7APF1HuQE