It’s true that YouTube can seem like an endless stream of cat videos, but the service can also offer so much more. Thanks to Ophir Kutiel, an Israeli musician better known as Kutiman, and his remarkable ability to mix and match YouTube videos, we now have the chance to see the fascinating results of unintended collaborations among church organists from West Virginia, didgeridoo players from Australia, teenage girls singing to their computers in bedrooms around the world, and countless others.

Kutiman introduces one of his works in simple terms:

This video is made of videos i found and really enjoyed watching ..
there is no intention to offend anyone this is truly from the love to music..
thank u all so much for sharing your talent..

you can check all the links to the original videos down here and also at the end of the video..

Stay tuned
kutiman

That’s right, Kutiman makes a point of crediting the original videos, but the whole that he creates is worth so much more than the sum of its parts. Take a look at “My Favorite Color” and I’m sure you’ll agree:

“The Mother of All Funk Chords” is also great:

In “Thru Jerusalem,” Kutiman takes his work to an even higher level, traveling around that ancient city and filming a wide variety of musicians himself, only later remixing their contributions into the clip that you see here:

Here is Kutiman describing the early days of his project to The New Yorker:

I play a little bit of almost every instrument. One day, last August, I was looking around on YouTube for new licks, you know, something for piano or guitar or drums. I found this guy playing drums—the first clip of “Mother of All Funk Chords.” I didn’t know Bernard Purdie was famous but I saw he had 100,000 views so I figured he was somebody, and the clip was so good, so funky. I found another video on YouTube that shows you how to download videos, so I took that Purdie clip and just started from there, grabbing other videos of people playing.

It took me about two months to make all the songs. I worked on them all at the same time, so I can’t really say which one took how long. I was working on it all the time—there was no day or night, really. When I was done, I sent the songs to a few friends and told them not to talk about the ThruYOU site until we were ready to tell more people. But one of my friends didn’t listen, I guess. The next day, I opened up my MySpace page and saw all these new friend requests and messages. People had found it, and after that, so many people tried to look at the site that the whole thing crashed. I got so many nice messages. One person called me “Jesus of YouTube.” I don’t think that’s right but it’s a good feeling.

If you would like to learn more about Kutiman and his work, visit his website, ThruYOU, as well as his YouTube channel.

Ebay can provide a valuable service, particularly if you’re trying to unload your unused Abdomenizer or pick up a copy of Kardashian Konfidential for less than a dollar, but did you know that Ebay can also be used to seek revenge on a person who may have crossed you? That’s exactly what a man in Croydon, South London did when he decided that his ex-brother-in-law’s vinyl record collection had been sitting around his sister’s home for just a bit too long. Not surprisingly, the original listing has been taken down, but here’s the slightly edited text, which is perhaps a bit NSFW if you have a delicate disposition:

You are bidding on a collection of 50 (approx) 12″ singles and LPs of crap music.

My sister found these in her attic last weekend, where they has been sat gathering dust for the last couple of decades. They used to belong to her ex-husband, who is one of the biggest arseholes ever to draw breath. I never liked the wanker, and based my initial antipathy towards him on his taste in music. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was that most contemptible form of pond life, a Jazz Funker. This meant that as well as shit taste in music, he had appalling taste in clothes too. Pringle jumpers, pleated Farrahs, shoes that looked like pasties, white socks, revolting shirts and a comical wedge-cut hairdon’t. Add to this 80s fashion horrorshow a Ford Capri and Super Mario-style moustache underlining his bulbous nose, and you get an object lesson in twatdom. No wonder Northern Soul fans (and everyone else) treated the Jazz Funk fans with sneering contempt.

I couldn’t comprehend what on earth my usually sensible sister could possibly see in the pillock. In vain I pleaded with her to send him packing. My argument that his hankering for Earth Wind & Fire records and attendance at soul weekenders made him a poor choice of mate was waved away as the rantings of a callow youth. She felt my reasoning was unsound.

Reader, she married him.

He made her life miserable for a few years with his moping, moody belligerence (and playing horrendous records like these). He told her lies and generally behaved like a platinum c*nt. Then he dumped her for his mistress when my sister was four months pregnant.

It’s now nearly 20 years later and I would still like to take a meat tenderizer to his face. But his most horrendous crime, worse than wiring up my granny’s shower so it was electrically live, worse even than his infidelity or the awful way he treated my sister, was the fact that he actually liked the abomination known as Jazz Funk. Here is the evidence. What a bastard.

Well, I suppose I’d better tell you what’s for sale, though why you would actually want to own this dreck is beyond me. It’s basically music for people who have a deep-seated hatred of music and want to inflict their pain on the world. But here goes nothing.

I’ve deleted the list of horrible records for the sake of brevity, but it’s available here if you’re really interested. The seller continues:

I mean, Shakatak for fucks sake. What a prick. And surely he must have realised that buying anything by Shalimar would open him up to ridicule. Even those bands’ mothers couldn’t bear to listen to that stuff. I know I couldn’t. None of this is play graded, only visually. I just could not bring myself to dirty my stylus with this bollocks.

Boring stuff: – I grade conservatively, particularly when I don’t like the records. Don’t ask me to split this lot. You buy it, you buy all of it and pay the shipping. I’m not keeping it in my house any longer than strictly necessary. For the same reason, no returns. I don’t want it back. Shipping in UK is £15 because the weight is approx 10kg. I’m willing to ship overseas at cost, but it’s likely to be expensive (maybe £45 in europe) and frankly this crap isn’t worth the stamps. If you want to collect from Croydon, that’s OK but I will look at you with a contemptuous sneer as you stand in my doorway, proving by your purchase that you are tone deaf and tasteless.

Good luck, and God help you for liking this drivel.

Shakatak’s “Brazilian Dawn” 12″ single? £0.29.

Level 42′s “World Machine” LP? £1.29.

Revenge on a hated ex-brother-in-law? Priceless.

David Desmond

Shakatak were even worse

It’s rare that I allow myself to post about music in this blog because it’s one of my great passions and I could easily allow it to overwhelm my intended focus on Ponzi schemers, oligarchs, and wealthy layabouts. Having said that, an event took place last Saturday that I feel obligated to note.

Not too long ago, James Murphy decided to break up his band, LCD Soundsystem, and their final show took place just a few days ago at Madison Square Garden. While it’s sad that such a talented band will be no more, the remarkable aspect to this story is that the band is retiring at its peak, following their most successful album to date, a sold-out tour, and, for what it’s worth, universal critical acclaim.

LCD Soundsystem may have retired, but we’re lucky to have memories like this:

Here’s James Murphy on playing live, from The Quietus:

I’m obsessed with how bands should perform live. I don’t like the easy way out. I like sound and power. I will go on stage and play a song that we have never played together as a band but I will not go on stage if our monitors aren’t right. I’m concerned with having a physical experience and having the band feel the power of what we’re playing sonically, and trusting that the audience will either like that or not. Try to be thoughtful and concerned but don’t pander. Sometimes when people get into being professional it’s pandering — it’s a fear-based performance where you’re trying not to fuck up and not to be judged or fail. Whereas I don’t care. I’d love to fail and be judged and crash and burn. I’m not like, ‘We don’t care about you, we’re here for ourselves.’ But I also don’t want to be like, [sings] ‘I’m performing and making faces for you.’ I want to stab them. I’m not a fucking four-year-old! Do your best! I want to watch you do your best and experience that as much as possible.

Here are his thoughts on compromising:

Bands either have fear or ego, that’s all they ever have. All this idiotic nonsense. What is it that’s important to you? What compromises are you willing to make? That’s the argument I get into with people in the industry. Why the fuck did you do this? If you’re trying to make money go be an investment banker – there’s fucking tons of it there. If you’re about music let’s talk about it. What are you doing actively to make music better? If you’re not doing that you’re just taking up space. Everyone seems so beaten. [sighs] ‘I’d love to but there’s no money in it.’ I’m just like, aaarrrrggggh. You’re just dying slowly.

It’s too bad that those sentiments aren’t shared by more bands. Wouldn’t music be more exciting if groups broke up before they had the chance to decline or simply never formed if all they were planning to do was produce homogenized pap?

If you’ve somehow never heard of LCD Soundsystem, click here to take a tour through their history.

David Desmond

In music, the spaces between the notes are as important as the notes themselves, in part because their length determines the rhythmic component underlying the melody. One would think that a musical piece composed entirely of those spaces and without a single note would be indistinguishable from silence and, therefore, stupid. John Cage would disagree.

In 1952, Cage created a piece that he called 4’33″ (i.e., four minutes and thirty-three seconds) that consisted of three movements of 30″, 2’23″, and 1’40″ in which the content would be provided by ambient sound rather than any conventional instrument. Here’s an excerpt from the score:

Cage’s idea was that the ambient sound would be the source of the musicality of the piece and make each performance of 4’33″ unique, as you can see here:

Some might suggest that Cage wrote 4’33″ as a prank, but there’s no doubt that he wanted to challenge the conventions of music. I don’t think I’ll be adding 4’33″ to my iPod anytime soon, but in a world in which Justin Bieber reigns supreme, it’s nice to be able to experience something that’s just a little bit different now and then.

David Desmond