It’s easy to forget that some of the simple joys of electronic music are foreign to many lay people. Odds are, if you read this site, you’re an intelligent and well-informed digital musician. (I don’t mean to stroke my own ego, either; because so many of you are intelligent and well-informed digital musicians, you send a whole lot of the information my way that makes this site even possible.) But for all the extensive discussion, a lot of what digital musicians seek to do in their performance is simple: they want to make their work expressive and performative, and convey some part of that gesture to audiences to include them in the action.

And so it is that a video of a live mashup is impressing general audiences as much as it is enthusiasts. It’s not a complex work, but it’s brilliantly performed, and in incorporating some 39 songs into one epic mash-up of Ableton-synced clips, it presents plenty of touchstones for audience members. The ingredients: FL Studio, Ableton Live, a Novation Launchpad, and a Novation ReMOTE Zero SL MKII.

It also helps being really good, as this person is: the “mash-up” is never awkward or overwhelming, and rather than boring bar-long sync, is played live with 16th-note clips. It isn’t so out of the ordinary compared to other virtuosic MPC videos, but that’s the joy of the Web: the best players do actually get their stuff in front of lots of eyeballs.

What’s also interesting is that, because it incorporates pop songs and you can see visually what he’s doing (in a design first seen on the software for the open-source monome platform), general audiences are picking it up. A few examples:
“Pop Culture” mega-mash-up: 39 songs in three minutes [Bailey Johnson for CBS News]

The video viral “video chart” at The Guardian, UK’s daily paper

College Humor’s Biggest Thing

No less than Kylie Minogue tweeted about it. Thanks to Novation’s Chris Mayes-Wright for keeping track of this video’s meteoric rise in the past four days. Artist Relations once meant mainly keeping celebs happy; now, it includes catering to YouTube stars, which I think is a nice development!

That popularity may encourage some trolling and jealousy, but I have to say, I’ve seen just as many hard-core Ableton and monome users and whatnot also drool over this video. (Thanks to everyone who sent this in – a lot of you sure did and I’m only now getting around to it! Blame constrained time and poor Internets here on the road in England.)

If you aren’t necessarily into pop samples, though, I think this shows that even some simple performance elements can appeal. Sure, we love far-out interfaces and big visual impact around these parts, but you can also simply turn off that bar-long quantization or whip out your instrument of choice – keys, strings, voice, pads, or whatever it is – and actually play. Most people really get and appreciate that, and it’s fun for the player, to boot.

And on that profound bombshell, I wish you a very happy weekend indeed.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d be a little confused and freaked out if I woke up and saw this first thing in the morning (and I lived in Ohio):

And it’s not just Dan Deacon. Dynamic duo Beatrix*Jar had a similarly awkward experience. There’s something strange about what’s going on here. The news people conducting the interviews are are genuinely enthusiastic, but there’s something not quite connecting in their approach. I don’t know if it’s an intentional lack of arts-based analysis or if they just like to keep it light & fluffy for the morning viewers, but the ultimate result is surreal.

Maybe it’s because it’s really early in the morning and these musicians are night owls? They seem a bit out of their element, trying to connect to that internal place that makes music happen, but they seem to be working uphill in that particular environment. When they do connect, the newspeople look a bit alienated and confused, like they just let a wild beast loose in their studio.

Here’s Getlofi.com’s Talking Computron and Igloo Martian on an evening news program in Madison, WI:

Don’t get me wrong- I think this trend is awesome. It feels like the media companies are really starting to get a whiff of this whole DIY-Maker-Bender movement, and they like what they smell. And really, what isn’t there to like? In many ways, this is human ingenuity and creativity manifest. People making the most of what’s around them, creating solutions instead of buying them, only limited by their creativity. It’s not just a fluff piece, it’s what got us to where we are today, and a sneak peek at where we might be going in the future.

That’s assuming that the future is strange, nerdy, glitchy and loud. I, for one, salute our future weird overlords.

Note: BENT festival 2008 takes place this week in NYC and next week in Minneapolis, and you can read all about it on the festival website.

8-bit music has definitely caught the attention of the mainstream. GameSpy has a good five-way interview with part of the group behind the new album of Kraftwerk covers, 8-bit Operators: The Music of Kraftwerk.

8-Bit Operators: It’s More Fun to Console

They miss my friend Kim Haeyoung (Bubblyfish), who made one of my favorite tracks on the album. (Hey, mainstream press, boys and girls can both play electronic music, 8-bit or 64-bit.) But it is a good read, and if you haven’t heard the album yet, it’s a lot of fun — partly for the broad range of interpretations on the album:

8-bit Operators

Kraftwerk goes nicely with Commodore 64′s, Game Boys, and NES systems, though it’s a tiny instrumental step rather than the leap that was Switched on Bach. Dig the shot of C64 homebrew music console Prophet64 in the Gamespy image.

In a week when we were pondering a new version of Logic Pro, it’s nice to know the Commodore 64 still lives. I mean, come on, which platform is the coolest here (stick it out for the end):