It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t a left you… without a hard beat to step to. Here’s something:
Mash up your Life Day with Dean Martin, Rakim, The Beach Boys, Biggie, Raffi, Baroness, ODB, and of course Chewbacca! 8 minutes of old school rap vs. heavy rock vs. seasonal cheese, cut up into tiny funky slices. Free to download.
Awesome Ninja Santa illustration by Neill Cameron.
Hey, it’s friday the 13th soon! Or now, depending on when you’re reading this! Or, it’s already happened. Ah the mystery of time. Anyway, in honour of that auspicious date… well, I kinda already did that Friday the 13th thing, so here’s something else, that’s moderately scary anyway: a mashup of various Led Zeppelin songs and the themes to the first two Silent Hill games.
Here’s the music to the little Friday the 13th sampling experiment I did recently:
All of the music I’ve made has been posted on this site for free. However, rather than downloading each track separately, it may be easier for you to head to the music section and grab them as albums. I’ve parceled them into two EPs: Early Shit, which is basically a miscellany of pre-2008 tracks, and Remixes 06-08, which should be pretty self-explanatory. There’s eleven tracks up in there, all free, so go grab ‘em.
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That shit needed an update, huh? Well, here it is, with a bunch of changes and a whole new look. The ‘big’ news, of course, is the EP coming out, and I’m loving Band Camp for music hosting, sales, streaming yada yada. However, at the moment I can’t upload any more than one track, so… whatever you do, don’t try and buy the ‘album’ yet, as $5 for one track ain’t exactly competitive pricing. BTW, I’ll also get it on iTunes & Emusic and all if you prefer that.
As part of the bitchin’ Old Nerdy Bastard compilation, I did a mashup of Maja’s track “Transformer”. It blends the Terminator theme with Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Lou Reed’s “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.” The reason why? Killer robots meet cars, plus a track from the album “Transformer”. And I guess cause they all sound pretty gosh durned okay together.
Transformer (Sarah Connor’s Wild Ride Mix) – 5.9MB MP3
I’ve done a couple of remixes of the track “Nerdsong” from Drown Radio’s new album Me Geek Pretty One Day. It’s a great album with a great range of sounds and styles. Anyway the first remix is a sort of electro cut:
Nerdsong (Snake Eyes Electro Remix) – 5.1MB MP3
And the second is a pretty simple mashup of Nine Inch Nails that happens to work pretty well with the vocals:
Nerdsong (Snake Eyes NIN Mash) – 4 MB MP3
After the country aspect of the Crate Digger Deathmatch, I’ve been listening to a ton of country, in particular Waylon Jennings. Holy shit is he the man or what.
Update: If you downloaded the track before 9:30pm today (feb 11), give it another shot – it’s been revised.
So I took part in the Crate Digger Deathmatch on saturday. In a nutshell, it’s a competition wherein 12 producers can each spend $12 on thrift store sound sources (records, toys, whatever) and then have 12 hours to create an album. There were three additional limitations: one sound source had to be from the 80s, there had to be either a backwards sample or circuit bent machinery used, and the album had to include either a dance track or a country song.
I was a bit worried about finding decent material, especially once I got to Value Village and discovered the LPs cost $2 (they used to be $1!). Also, you gotta have some breaks, if only to pull clean drum sounds. But as it turned out, there was gold in them hills.
The biggest score is that “Popular Music That Will Live Forever” box set, which was $4 for 10 glorious albums, including “film music”, “marches”, and “music for relaxation”, all of which got some play on my album. The New Kids on the Block CD gave forth its bounty of mediocre 80s drum machine breaks, but a few effects fattened them up okay. I grabbed a country compilation to see if I could pull off a country tune. I was pleased to find the Danny Kaye Fairy Tales disc – it wound up providing the glue, if you will, to hold the whole affair together: every track in my entry features a sample from a different fairy tale, and those samples have at least a tenuous relationship with the music.
Lastly, the James Last album was a blast. (I sincerely apologize for that sentence.) I had never heard of him, but the sleeve displayed dozens of albums by the man, all called “Non Stop Dancing”, “Super Non Stop Dancing” etc. Wikipedia is indeed correct when it states that his albums feature “brief renditions of popular songs, all tied together by an insistent dance beat and joyous crowd noises”. It’s the album I used the least, but it still kinda cracked me up. Plus, sweet cover.
I think it went pretty well. The country comp was the biggest surprise, both because the record in the sleeve wasn’t the same as the sleeve (but was luckily still a country comp), and because I managed to use quite a bit of it. In general, I tried to take the rules more to heart than necessary and blend in both 80s and country textures wherever possible.
Because of the time limitation, the tracks aren’t well mixed and could probably use a few more layers and changeups. Thing is, just playing through the records and sorting the samples takes a few hours out of the day, and I figured I’d be better off spending time on the composition phase than on the fine tuning and mixing. But judge for your own self.
True Tales (25MB zip archive)
Here are some liner notes FWIW. I don’t mean them to ‘explain’ the songs, and I hope you wouldn’t believe me if I did anyways, as listening to what artists say about their work is a fool’s game. But I thought it would be interesting to talk a little about the samples used.
1. Intro – had to set up the fairy tale motif. Assorted loops in the background, ending with a flourish of NKotB.
2. Texas Is Probably Pretty Hot – this is the one I selected as a single, and it’s also the country track. I get the biggest kick out of the little synchronicities of loop-based composition, and here a James Last party track matched up perfectly with the country sample – it only comes in at the end, the horn blasts. In the bridge, I managed to blend a bit of mambo from the “music for relaxation” disc with the country song. Another rewarding synchronicity.
The Kaye bite is from “Ugly Duckling”. There’s a brief bit in the tale about some wild birds who don’t give a shit about how the duck looks, but soon after they’re introduced they’re killed off. They seemed kinda like cowboy types to me.
3. The Princess – another country sample is the base upon which a melancholy, vaguely 80s track emerges. Again, a Last horn sample makes its way in toward the end. I was happy with how “The Princess and the Pea” synched with the vocal sample, making this the song of a failed princess maybe? Overall this reminds me of “Sometimes I Rhyme Fast” by Nice n Smooth. Wish I coulda laid some of their raps over it.
4. Taking Candy from a Baby – main sample is the theme from Exodus which I see now has been widely sampled. I hadn’t seen the film and had never heard the theme before, oddly enough. YAN country sample managed to fit in nicely and give the track a real spaghetti western feel. A country vocal sample gives the track its name and jived with the fairy tale’s motif of personal gain coming at a cost.
5. The Truth – the fairy tale is called “Absolutely True”, and I wasn’t familiar with it, but it’s basically about broken telephone. The hen’s original statement is progressively garbled by retellings until she herself doesn’t recognize it when it comes back to her. I figured that this would be the place to deploy reverse messages, and that plus the “story like this cannot be hushed up” and the main musical sample (theme from Laura give the track a sorta international conspiracy flavour.
6. The Fire – what a sad tale “The Tin Soldier” is. Anyway this started when I saw “Oh Canada” on the marches disc and thought it might be fun to mangle. Which it was, and the national anthem and soldier story just went together. If I had time I would fix the mix on this one and flesh it out a bit more.
This was a lot of work but also fun and as a result I wound up with more ‘finished’ tracks than I’d made in a year. Can’t wait to hear everyone else’s. Also, I normally only metaphorically crate-dig, on the internets, so it was a great pleasure doing it literally, actually feeling the albums, reading the sleeves, smelling the dust and awesomeness. I felt like I connected with some of my musical role models. I’m thinking about making a habit of it.
See here for links to all the other producers’ sites. Hipster Please would also be a good place to look for more news on the competition and the inevitable results.
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Everything will follow.
If Your Thinking’s Right – 4.5MB MP3