Cut & Paste

So here it is, my virginal blog, and I go and taint it by using it as a shameless plug for my mashups!

What are mashups? They're an extention of the favourite love token of the music-savvy teenager; the mix tape. However, unlike a mix tape, mash-ups don't usually contain full songs. Rather they consist of snippets or smaller segments of songs blended together, often with some quirky soundbites and samples thrown in for good measure.

I've always been interested in mashups...I can remember making a crude one of Duran Duran and A-ha (with snippets of The Jungle Book mixed in) using a twin-deck cassette player. I wish I'd had the foresight to keep the tape. God knows how I managed to get anything worth listening to, but at the time I thought it was great (but then I would have only been about 14).

Of course, the kings of the mashup are the Dewaele Brothers, possibly the only decent contribution Belgium has made to modern music? Their day jobs are as figureheads of the band Soulwax, (I can't decide whether this is a brilliant website format or a migraine waiting to happen?!) but by night they morph into 2ManyDJ's; producing tens of bootleg mashup albums (and two or three legit ones too). If you've never come across them, check them out. If you want somewhere to begin, then As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt2 is the seminal recording, although Radio Soulwax Live - Get Yer Yo Yo's Out! is a personal fave.

If you are already a 2ManyDJ's fan, and fancy something different, look no further than Brighton's one-man-masher The Kleptones (aka Eric Kleptone....although I am suspicious that that is not what his mum calls him). The Kleptones have produced two of the weirdest mashup albums ever in Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots and A Night At The Hip-Hopera, mixing hip-hop with, respectively, The Flaming Lips and Queen. It shouldn't work....but it does. If hip-hop's not your thing (and it's not mine either, but I love those albums), then give 24 Hours a try. This is a double CD mashup based on a full day in a person's life; very clever as well as being an aural treat (check out the stunning "0900 Daft Purple").

My final recommendation is CCC's first Beatles mashup Revolved. This is basically a mashup album using each track of The Beatles' Revolver as it's base. My favourite tracks are the opener "Tax Jam Pollution" (mixing Beck with Tax Man) and "Close To No One" (For No One meets The Cure). CCC followed up by giving Sgt Pepper's the same treatment Cracked Pepper but, for me, it fails to hit the heights of his first attempt.

So finally, what about my own mashups? Well, they're not in the same class as any I mentioned above, but I've done three worth releasing into the ether. The first is a mashup of indie tracks with a dance beat called "Indie Cindy Dances Round Her Handbag"; the second was done for a friend and is a "Madchester" mashup called "Ecstatic For It?" and the third is a festive mashup (inspired by the brilliant DJ Riko christmas mashups) called "I Bet Yule Look Good On The Dance Floor". You can find them all on b00mb0x, a DJ mixtape site with some other splendid mashups to try.