I have finished recording the second ‘Xmash’ podcast – 339 and of course sod’s law I find that Bootie’s Mashup Christmas 6 has dropped while I am recording the last bit! Weirdly I had already played the included DJ Schmolli mashup in the first section I recorded on Saturday – great minds, etc. There is Macca ‘Wonderful…’ theme accintentionally across both shows.
And it also reminded me I meant to include this DJ Cummerbund mashup of Metallica and Trans Siberian Orchestra but now y’all can download it as part of the compilation – and not have to laboriously rip the YouTube audio and play that instead (which for the record I hate, but these YouTube-only mashers give me no choice, unless you speak to their manager and they never get back to you *ahem*).
Also includes one of the better Mariah Carey mashup bar mine from Lewis Wake which I talked about on the podcast – I was rather WAP-ed out after the DJNoNo one, In fact I am rather WAP-ed out full stop, even though it is the song of the year.
Apart from those there have been a lot of surprisingly meh ‘All I Want For Christmas’ mashups since the stems leaked, with all the winds and current tech in their favour I expected someone to blow my creaky 12 year old Santastic 4 / A Very Bootie Christmas 3 mashup completely out of the water..[1]
I am a bit biased but nope, I’ve not heard better yet. *arms-crossed-impress-me-pose*.
I mean I didn’t even have an acapella or instrumental back then, or the ability to extract them via AI? Come on mashup community you can do better than that! Also there are some nice Last Christmas mashups out there and on this new mixtape but nothing definitive or world-shattering. Nothing I found was ‘Radio Clash’ good enough to play, so I got y’all some breakcore/mashcore for Xmas instead :-p. Yr welcome!
Aww, there’s always next year….next year…..next year *echo fade*
[1]. I could remake Scarey Xmas, but something I have learned recently is that you cannot just replace old filtered/Extra Boy acapella ‘extractions’ with modern AI ones like created with iZotope’s RX8. They are too clean and thus sound empty and weird. I’ve realised this during my mastering and tweaking process for Kodiak Moment that unless I completely remake them from scratch, my old mashups lose a lot of their character and charm if you try and just drag and drop old techniques with new ones.
The tricks and hacks we used like filtering and phase extraction were limitations we had to work around and meant we made creative decisions that sounded different and unique. I wish people realised that more, that imperfections and such mother of necessity invention is part of the appeal and that perfectly clean technically perfect mashups sound boring and machine-like sometimes.
I have argued for decades that mashups should sound a bit alien, a bit uncanny valley – they shouldn’t sound like existing original tracks. There have been ones that do, and guess what? If you don’t know either track the entire point is lost on you, like a joke that falls flat because you don’t know the reference. That slight wonkiness is part of the sound of mashups, otherwise people don’t key into it’s difference and it’s DIY nature. It’s a signifier that we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
Lecture over! Thanks for coming to my footnote TIM talk.
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