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Idiosyncratic end of year post

Inspired by the likes of CultureBully’s Top 10 mashups of 2010 and Bootie’s Best of 2010 collections, and the fact I should have sent in my top 5 but was too busy organising the Milan-Venice trip, here are my thoughts about 2010, and best mashups of the year. With a lot less Van Halen 😉

Favourite mashups…

I usually moan about these lists ignoring X or Y, but this year I agree with a fair bit of them, probably in part because I listen to far less mashups than I used to.

But if there was one mashup of 2010 I had to say was my best it would be the also Culture Bully #2 (should have been #1) and strangely not present on the Bootie comp – it’s DJ Schmolli‘s Cooleur Rock n’ Roll.

It’s pop, it’s dance, it’s new and old, electro and rock and pop, recogniseable yet not, everything that’s good about a AvsB. I liked it so much it inspired my own Cooleur mash as Captain Obvious. Not often I like a mashup so much it inspires me to also have a go. Best mash of 2010, no question.

Ian Fondue – Kiss You – many people tried to mash the song of the year (more later about that) but like all Cee-Lo’s songs they are deceptively simple sounding yet always complex to work with. Kleptones attempt could have made it here if it wasn’t actually beaten to the punch by Ian Fondue and his Katy Perry bootleg – and would also violate my no Van Halen rule on this post. Van Halen, DENIED!

//www.radioclash.com/mp3s/IanFondue-KissYou.mp3

Bastard Pop and bootlegs started as a humorous, experimental, tongue in cheek and frankly silly artform so it was nice to hear some of that ol’ Bastard spirit in DJ Lobsterdust‘s Knock Out Eileen (LL Cool J vs Dexy’s Midnight Runners) taking the dungaree-bothering blue eyed soul boys and mixing them with LL Cool J’s silliest song, bar his Xmas one. Perfect. And was rightly pride of place on the Bootie comp, although nowhere to be seen on the CB list, oddly.

The Kleptones Uptime / Downtime album occupied a lot of my 2010 (more about that later) but was chock full of great songs – if I could nominate the whole album here I would, it’s all good. But I think it has to be Welcome Back, not only because I made the video for it (plug plug) but really after hearing it for the 50 millionth time in editing most mashups lose their sheen. This one stood up to that abuse – and there was a few late nights on this one, I can tell you…

YouTube brings strange pleasures sometimes – for one the remixing of films using only the soundtrack usually in a lush, sleep IDM style. Dainumo is the current master of this, and haunted my iPod with tracks such as Bronze Star proving that you don’t actually need the video for these songs to work. Lovely. And made me play Frank Sinatra on the podcast and like it, bastard!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEYNlaEIHwk

Songs and albums wot I haz liked…

I think this year was pwned by Cee-Lo’s Fuck You, it just was the song of the year. Catchy, and wonderfully rude, and had lyrics comparing X-Box and Atari, what’s not to like? And loads of people tried to mash it, and not many of them succeeded. It’s a hard one to do. And please don’t mention Fiddy’s lazy ‘version’. *puke*

Yeasayer’s Odd Blood stayed on my iPod for most of the year – catchy songs but very odd production, where you weren’t really sure how the album was made or with what. Totally fresh and different from the millions of lazy 80’s electro synth copyists out there, with personal yet abstract themes and MGMT must’ve been cursing since their mantle was well and truly stolen. So here’s Madder Red from the LP, like all their videos completely bizarre:

Underworld are a bit of a on/off strange fish for me, I like some of their songs but like Robyn they are mostly a singles band for me, the odd song I like but the albums tend to leave me dry, as well as some of their more experimental stuff. Whoever thought of teaming them up with High Contrast is a genius though. Here’s Scribble which was cause of much bouncing and happy smiles in 2010, and seemed a logical progression and a sort of homecoming for Underworld…CHOON!!!!

Also on the DnB tip, album wasn’t as amazing as I hoped, but Danny Byrd should most definitely get props too:

And this should’ve been a single with a proper video – wouldn’t Snoop vs Robyn be a hoot? U Should Know Better, record companies! This has HIT written all over it…

Massive Attack’s Paradise Circus was a ghostly joy that haunted TV, radio, XXX videos and the like. Certainly made up for a spotty album.

Kanye is marmite for most people, but he really is the first post-modern rapper; someone who surfs the fine line between ego and humility, forgiveness and fuckups. If I was doing a section on video I’d definitely include his excellent if very bizarre (and Jodorowsky & Matthew Barney influenced, amongst others) Runaway the 30 minute movie. The album My Dark Fantasy has some great songs, not 100% there, ironically it’s the traditional hiphop songs that let it down…the more interesting tracks shows him trying to stretch his wings past the hiphop idiom, into art, IDM, prog rock, ballet, classical…go on Kanye, just go for it…ignore the haters. And Runaway the song has become a personal anthem for me, mostly because of the accurate line ‘you’ve been putting up with my shit for way too long’ and an apt description of the power struggle in relationships…

And Eve Massacre introduced me to some good music this year via her posts, as has Ian Fondue…and she introduced me to the hypnagogic genre and the likes of White Rainbow and Mark McGuire, who in his dayjob guise is part of Emeralds – the album ‘Does it Look Like I’m Here?’ is very good, and the best track on it is Candy Shoppe:

Disappointments…

Well chief of those has to be Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats, and the World Cup respectively. The former went back on his promises and has made sure the Libs won’t get a sniff of power for another 70 years, and the latter was a bit of a let down for the first WC I’d bother to watch since 1990. And I had to do about a thousand football related banners with bouncing footballs *shudder*. Misfits series 2 jumped the shark – well more jumped it, did the loop the loop and then throttled it with the tow rope – sadly, as did The Walking Dead but that is only series 1 and still could turn out to be great, here’s hoping. Wild Beasts didn’t win the Mercury Prize, then again that means they avoid the curse! Yay! And a certain person I was newly involved with dumping me just before Xmas. Not cool.

Achievements…aka Wot I Did in My Holydaze

Well here are a few things I was rather proud of in 2010, some of which took off like Concorde, some of the others were more like the Air France version.

At the start – and still at the end of the year was the Videotones Project..had the idea of video mashing the whole of the Uptime and Downtime albums on New Years Day and mentioned it to Eric Kleptone (he wanted to do it in 3 months…hehe) , and here we are with most if not all the Uptime album with videos and Downtime is in progress…my videos were shown at Glastonbury not once but twice as part of the Kleptones live set along with others from the project, and one video that went viral was by Crumbs Chief (currently 102K views!). Apparently this video gets shown by professors and teachers to their students, which I like a lot:

I had my first properly released remix released as part of the Crackdown project as Year Zero…and made less than 50 euros between us, so got nothing. LOL.

A new alias was born, and it was kinda obvious. As a tribute to Obvious Productions (which is NOT ME – it’s Soundhog, mmkay?) I wanted to do some uber-pop ideas I had and wouldn’t usually release cos of their cheese factor so did so as Captain Obvious. But I’m really proud of all 3 of these – and now Scissor Sisters have made a video and finally releasing Invisible Light then ‘The Light of Pleasure’ might just get a new shiny video…;-). Unlike the other two this one seems to have been overlooked…maybe it’ll have it’s day in 2011.

As part of the APC (hi Simon!) Young Punx Mashed Popped Punked project I did videos for DJ Schmolli and DJBC, and I got a request that the Young Punx show my video for DjBC‘s Unbelievable Juice and Gin video as part of their show…which was cool – and a fun video to make.

https://vimeo.com/11022073

From an idea from Jeb 50PoundNote, Nasty Chewing Girls (Annie vs Vanity6) not only appeared as oki’s fave on the Culture Bully 2010 list but Annie Strand herself tweeted it. First time I got approval from someone I’d mashed…another one I’d like to do a video for but there isn’t a decent copy of Vanity6 out there that doesn’t get cease and desisted by a certain purple person.

And got a few requests from people to make videos for them, which is always cool – like LeeDM101 for his excellent Radioactive Tubular Girls mash, which is one of my better ones, if I say so myself!

https://vimeo.com/14467876

Comments

One response to “Idiosyncratic end of year post”

  1. Schmolli avatar

    Better late than never 😉 Thanx very much for the kind words and Happy New Year! 😉

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