I think I linked to this lovely YouTube mashup a few months ago. If you haven’t seen it, you are in for a treat.
This spring, the radical dissonance at the madhouse YouTube was — for a moment, at least — subdued. Did you feel it? The cacophonous video-sharing site was briefly brought to harmony in March by a composer, animator and musician known as Kutiman. Born Ophir Kutiel in Jerusalem in 1981, Kutiman created a minor masterpiece with an online project called ThruYOU that makes both sense and music of YouTube’s warring tendencies of compartmentalization and community.
ThruYOU is an album of seven original songs, each built from dozens of fragments of video clips of (mostly amateur) musicians, selected from among the seemingly endless footage of music lessons and private recitals archived on YouTube. (You can watch and listen on Thru-You.com, Kutiman’s cleverly custom-designed site.) Over what must have been a grueling two months, Kutiman collected an array of striking sounds and images, some no longer than a split second, and pressed them into musical service. Each one now furnishes a note or two, or a groove or a sensibility, in Kutiman’s audiovisual medleys. He has put the fractured universe of musical YouTube in concert. The housebound noodlers of the world now miraculously jam together.
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But whatever its standing as ideological object, ThruYOU is also just stunning. Using and refining the technique of “video scratching,” ThruYOU builds fully orchestrated songs from Kutiman’s selected digital excerpts. Most of the clips show musicians in modest domestic spaces, improvised studios, barely finished basements and bunkerlike bedrooms. The videos almost always feature one musician in a soliloquy tableau that’s by now familiar to YouTubers: somewhat sheepishly, a soloist plays into a self-monitored camera and cheap microphone.
[Click to continue reading The Medium – World Music – NYTimes.com]
Here’s the first track: Mother of All Funk Chords
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tprMEs-zfQA
Though really, you should spend a few moments and watch all of the cuts from this “album” directly at Thru-You.com (the track selections are on the right of the screen). I shudder to think of how much time was spent compiling and cross-referencing these clips, but the results are just stupendous.