Lately I’ve been getting more and more into Mashups — songs created by taking two or more different songs and “mashing” them together into one. While some aren’t much more complex than the simple beatmatching I did while I was dj’ing, others I’ve found are jaw-droppingly cool, with layers of multiple tracks that really shouldn’t work together as well as they do.
The first one I can remember finding I stumbled across a few years ago, long before the term “mashup” gained popularity. A fairly simple mashup, it laid the vocal track from Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” over the acid electronica of Winx’ “Higher State of Consciousness”.
Over the past few months, as the mashup trend has become more and more mainstream, I’ve been able to find a lot of really good stuff, often thanks to links on either Boing Boing or Waxy.
The Kleptones‘ “A Night at the Hip-Hopera“, for instance, combines Queen’s music with a lot of old- and new-school hip-hop. More recently, they’ve released “From Detroit to J.A.“, which plays similar tricks with a ton of old Motown tunes.
DJ Danger Mouse‘s “Grey Album“, combining vocals from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” with The Beatles’ “White Album” got a lot of attention last year, leading to the “Grey Tuesday” campaign. It also led to more experiments with Jay-Z’s vocal tracks, including Cheap Cologne’s “Double Black” album using Metallica’s “Black Album” as the musical background.
The Beatles have proven to be a favorite of the mashup scene (much to the consternation of their record company and the RIAA). DJ BC combined the Beatles and the Beastie Boys to create The Beastles; and ccc just released Revolved, a re-working of their Revolver album.
The Who Boys is a mashup of The Who and The Beach Boys — not one of my personal favorites of the mashups I’ve found, but still interesting.
I also just grabbed a torrent of tracks from DJ Earworm that has some incredible work.
So, then, I’m curious about two things.
Firstly — is there anyone else dropping by here that’s been following this trend? If so, are there any mashup artists or particular tracks that you’d recommend?
Secondly — all the “how-to” tutorials I’ve seen for creating mashups so far have been PC-oriented. I poked around a little bit at GarageBand, but it doesn’t seem to be the best tool for this kind of work (specifically, while I can easily import tracks from my music library, there doesn’t seem to be a way to time-stretch or -compress imported audio to ensure that the tempos match). Any recommendations for Mac-specific audio software or tutorials in this realm? I may not actually be able to come up with anything, but there are a couple of ideas floating around my head that might be fun to play with.
“Policy of Sweet Dreams” by Depeche Mode/Eurythmics from the album www.djearworm.com (2004, 4:43).