It’s the soul of YouTube. Or at least, YouTube soul, mashed together.

In case you haven’t already seen this making its rounds, an epic collection of instructional and jazzy video clips get mushed together into a colossal, remixed funk band. What’s lovely about this is that the results don’t sound like a mash up: they sound like these clips somehow sprang to life and joined a soul band, playing live. And then the Theremin arrives.

You watch one video. And then you find there are seven more. ThruYou is a complete YouTube video album, complete with glitched bits of interface artifacts around. And according to the creator, nothing here is faked; that is, “what you see is what you hear.”

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

thru-you.com
Watch the original Bernard Purdie Drum Shuffle and more goodies at http://www.youtube.com/user/kutiman

The creator of this is Kutiman, an Israeli funk musician and producer. How cool is he? This cool:

It turns out the Internet hasn’t totally sucked our Soul.

Would You Like to Tap My Box? from kamoni on Vimeo.

Drum machine lovers, you now have the beat gear equivalent of Matt Harding and Where the Hell is Matt?. Kamoni, aka sonic creator, composer, and experimenter Micah Frank, takes his favorite devices out on the road, piecing them together into an epic YouTubular jam.

Doepfer and Korg, Elektron and Akai, plus a lot of other devices make their way around New York and Brooklyn and other parts of the world. Ableton I think figured into editing the video clips in time — thank you, Live, for video. I could point out individual devices, but then I’d ruin your fun, wouldn’t I?

Of course, this could be both emulated and expanded. We could perform a single rhythm, played by MPC and Machinedrum owners around the planet. (You could even get that laptop running on battery.)

I can see it now. Internets, go!

And yes, this does demonstrate where puremagnetik gets all those beats for their line of sampled things. Micah gets his hands on a lot of gear.

Updated: Replaced with a Vimeo link. Google seems to be having a bad week. We like Vimeo better for videos, anyway.

Distributing music on USB sticks or removable flash memory is an idea various parties have tried for the last few years. The Creative Commons advocates at self-proclaimed “non-evil” indie label Magnatune sold USB sticks pre-loaded with ten albums in 2004; Barenaked Ladies had the nicely-named Barenaked on a stick. But to really make the idea (ahem) stick, you’d need some big distribution. And that’s what a new initiative backed by the major labels and massive flash memory manufacturer SanDisk promises to do.

slotMusic.org | Press Release

See also GearLog, which notes that SanDisk previously did a free promotional SD of music

Wired News asks, “but why?”, to which I’d answer – it might well be easier to load music onto a phone in parts of the world other than the US, you might more easily distribute videos, and artists looking to increase the value of their CDs could innovate on revitalizing album art.

First, let’s start with the players, as that’s basically the big news here.

Hardware: SanDisk, the folks who invented flash storage and make more of it than anyone else

Labels: A huge set of the majors – EMI Music (which includes the likes of Angel, Capitol, Blue Note, and Astrelwerks), Sony BMG, Warner Music (including Atlantic, Nonesuch, Rhino), and the world’s biggest music company, Universal Music Group

Retailers: Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and other US retailers, with Europe to follow – keeping in mind, Wal-Mart remains the biggest brick-and-mortar seller in the US

When it’s happening: Exact date TBA, but officially by the holidays

Which artists: Most likely, lots of them. An EMI representative who spoke with CDM confirmed two chart-topping examples: Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and Kate Perry’s One of the Boys.

Now, you’d be right to be skeptical of how this format will be received, but it’s certainly a big distribution play with that arrangement of labels and retailers.

The hardware in question is basically SanDisk’s tiny removable flash memory format microSD, rebranded and repackaged as slotMusic. (A representative of SanDisk tells us there are some other subtle technological differences; more on that soon.) The important thing about this is that the hardware you buy has no DRM on it at all; it’s just standard flash memory you can plug into phones and mobile devices, or, via a tiny included USB sleeve, a computer.

SanDisk’s format specifies DRM-free, 320 kpbs MP3s as the music format. Gruvi, SanDisk’s previous attempt at turning their lucrative flash memory business into a music format was a miserable failure, but by contrast, it was locked with DRM features and, excepting a big release by the Rolling Stones, lacked support from labels and retailers. (I see Gruvi has even been largely erased from SanDisk’s website.)

It’s not animal-friendly, constructed of black leather and snakeskin, but it is fashion-forward. It’s Rucyl Mills’ over-the-shoulder, wearable MIDI controller, complete with pads, knobs and faders (looking mysteriously like they were liberated from an M-Audio Trigger Finger). Rucyl describes her creation:

I built the elektro-07 so I could control the sonic and visual parameters of my live performances without having to look deep into the eye of my laptop, hunched over in computer music stance. I’m still learning how to play it.. Software wise, it runs a maxMSP/Jitter patch smoothly, connected to my laptop by a long usb cable. Major thanks to Luke DuBois.

I have to agree: I’ve seen people with great stage presence hunched over laptops, but hunching is … well, uncomfortable. Note, by contrast, her relaxed pose.

Rucyl is a NY-based electronic musician and artist, with an impressive portfolio of interactive works.

Rucyl Mills site

As for the “Sexy Computer Nerd” reference, that’s a reference to Rucyl’s love ballad to you PHP-coding, blinking-LED-heart heartthrobs out there:

From musician Jeremy Linzee and Ethan Vogt comes this lovely fusion of re-cut educational film with music. Ethan and Jeremy work together live, with Ethan recutting the video on the fly. It’s a really terrific way for this filmmaker and musician to work together. Normally we run this sort of thing over on Create Digital Motion, but since it’s by definition a 50/50 collaboration, I thought I’d spread the love and kick off the weekend with a moody reinterpretation of human biology. (Warning: mild, biology-class nudity appears briefly.)

Hopefully we’ll have Jeremy and Ethan together for one of our future events here in New York soon.