Thursday, March 12, 2009

Kutiman cuttin up the Tubes!

The internet's been humming today with the music mashups of Kutiman, an Israeli artist who's been using Youtube to the fullest breadth the website has to offer. It's pretty cool stuff:



He's a mashup artists along the lineage of Too Many DJ's and more recently the bombastic dancehaller Girl Talk, but the samples Kutiman uses all come specifically from Youtube and incorporate the video portion as well. This tiny distinction makes Kutiman's songs that much greater, because the humble bedrooms, basements, and streetcorners that youtubers broadcast from, complete with crappy lighting and personal sillinesses, become a cohesive song that maintains the tie to its composite parts. Like Daft Punk's Around The World we get a visual for every sound, but in this case the visual was born with the sample. So we get a backstory to every note, scratch, and vocal, an insight into how it was manipulated for the final song. In his amazingly simple way, Kutiman taps into the layering and wealth of information on Youtube and repurposes it into an anthemic readers digest of DIY creativity.

This is what I love about Youtube: It is a constant stream of lo-grade creativity, which cumulatively adds up to something exciting and fresh about the 21st century. Anyone with a cameraphone and a personality (or lack thereof) can be a player. And though Kutiman purposed this creative energy towards music, the possibilities are pretty much limitless. Imagine a screenplay written out of youtube confessional 1-liners with some kind of connecting theme, or a choose-your-own-adventure style argument that links contrasting views of different videos in a continuous point-counterpoint.

The infinite beauty on the net is sometimes buried under ceaseless comments and driveling myspace profiles, but jesus it's a powerful source. Omniscience via the terminal makes us quiet individual gods. Let us create.

I think my favorites are Babylon Band and I'm New. The Vocoder bit in Wait for Me is pretty good too. Screw it, I like them all. I love the interface too, literally cutting up youtube for a new kind of art. Cheers.

Thanks to Luke for throwin' down the gauntlet.

4 comments:

~kitticus~ said...

very cool! I'll do some checkin out when I have some time. thanx for always bein' on the up'n'up Davey!!!

Tom said...

Speechlessness. Kind of. This dude is a prophet, I just might have to accept Kutiman as my personal savior.

Luke Williams said...

Perfect!! The "This is what I love about YouTube:" paragraph is precisely the kind of cool-stuff-plus-social-cultural-context that I think about but count on you to think about better. Someday I'll be smart too and stuff.

Davey D said...

Thanks guys! It's fun to geek out about this stuff...

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