By Marke B.
Writing about electronic music in this Age Of Everything Always Available seems to be more and more an exercise in nostalgia. Artists are caught up mousing over the pull-down menu of the past, widgeting it into today’s latest technology — especially in the case of video mashups. (A similar-type thing happened with the debut of the CD, when the past was rummaged through for reissue-mania, and, as the Guardian‘s Johnny Ray Huston has pointed out, reissues still hold dollar-sway and carry much label cred in the record industry). Earlier this year, I attempted to fathom how Israeli YouTube mashup genius Kutiman was working the nostalgia tip — not in the literally referential, crate-digging manner of DJ Shadow, but in a melancholic, sampladelic way all his own.
Now — joy of joys, for real — we have the latest video mashup by one of Kutiman’s indisputable forebears, Fagottron. This, you cannot deny the literal nostalgia of. Not just because he’s tapping directly into the mid-90s heyday of electronica — but because he’s freaking sampling the Disney movies of yesteryear. “The track is composed of a sine wave bass, custom drum sequences, and sounds recorded from the Disney film Mary Poppins,” the YouTube more info box relays, deliciously. Funny, that was going to be my epitaph.
Fagottron, “Expialidocious”
And Fagy’s not just unleashing his dizzying Avid skills on the super-famous flicks (although I’d love to see his version of Ariel) — here’s a couple he did two years ago that took me back to those misty “movie afternoons” in the grade-school gymansia of my youthfulness, albeit in slightly freakier form:
Fagottron, “White Magic”