Back to the post modern black art of the remix again. Possibly the most game-changing development of the last 20 or so years, the cutting up, re-using, re-mixing and general mashing up of samples or even whole tracks is everywhere.  

So evolved is the art these days that we’ve reached a stage where the different remix artists have developed styles and sounds that are as recognisably distinctive as say the individual styles and sounds of different singers or guitarists in the ’70′s or ’80′s. And recognisably distinctive whatever the original source material.

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Welcome to the Worlds of Mashup and of, despite what his stage name might suggest, the shy and retiring Fuckintosh.

When we left sampling in ABON 0019 with The Field, we were listening to a sample from a single song manipulated to create a new track. In contrast Mashup takes two songs by different artists and creates an original piece by mashing the two together. Most Mashup seems to involve cutting the vocals from one song and laying them onto another. The results are often comic because of the ‘inappropriateness’ of the words in their new context. Fuckintosh, although firmly a Mashup artist produces works of beauty that are as far from ‘Novelty’ tracks as you could imagine. Despite what his stage name might suggest.

In the hands of Fuckintosh, time and time again (he’s produced eight stunning albums of this stuff to my knowledge so far) Mashup becomes a creative process that produces technically brilliant and completely original pieces of music that occupy a space which the source or original recordings rarely even suggest might exist. To my ears his work is far more stimulating and original than most of the music created by his peers writing ‘original’ songs from scratch. So while a lot of Mashup can be very crudely put together and a little nihilistic, Fuckintosh’s is highly creative and optimistic. Despite what his stage name might suggest.

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Five minutes of sublime music. Five minutes that tells the story of one very important chapter in recent musical history.

What we have here is a 3 or 4 second sample of a very well known song used to create a completely new piece of music. There is some drum machining in there too (created by The Field) but it’s primarily the sample from the original song played over and over again through various pieces of effects technology.   

Yet it sounds stunningly original and precisely of this minute rather than 1984 when the original song was released. It’s a very creative piece of work yet the creativity does not come from the song writing or the musicianship, and it’s certainly not from the words or their meaning as they’ve been left out entirely. The creativity is in the sampling and editing and remixing. What started as Dub experimentation in Jamaica in the late ’60′s with Mixing Desk as musical instrument and Producer as creator (see ABON 0014) has evolved into this.

The debate about the merits and creative morality of this post modern form of creating music versus more traditional song writing and performing is over (surely!). In the light of the sheer beauty, emotion and creativity of much post modern music it has become an academic debate. A more interesting topic for discussion is why the sampling of this particular bit of that song in precisely this way results in a sublime piece of music.

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