Go Home Productions
POPULAR ART TWO (2003)

I look forward to getting e-mail from Mr. Vidler. Every couple of weeks he sends out a message to his fans about where he's DJ-ing, what he's currently mixing and usually there is an announcement about a new download on his website. Today, there was an album - a collection of twenty of his mash-ups from the second half of 2003, all remastered and sparkly clean. There isn't enough bandwidth in the world to get these babies onto your computer fast enough.

I think my friends are tired of getting e-mails from me telling them to go to his site and download songs because I end up doing it every time he posts something. After I type this, I'm sending yet another. Sorry, but this stuff is so amazing everyone in the world should hear it - especially anyone interested in sound design or mixing. Mr. ViIdler is simply amazing. GHP is consistantly the best mash-up artist out there.

A mash-up, if you aren't familiar with the term, is when an artist takes the instrumental track(s) from a song(s) and mixes an a capella vocal from another track on top. The most famous recent example of this music form is THE GRAY ALBUM by DJ Danger Mouse, which contains the rapping from Jay-Z's BLACK ALBUM with tracks cut from The Beatles WHITE ALBUM. It generated a lot of press when it came out - the lawyers who control the Beatles catalog weren't happy. You can download a copy of it if you haven't heard it 'cause it's pretty great. But not as great as Go Home Productions.

Mash-ups are a lot of fun as they are almost always collisions between extremes (Sex Pistols and Madonna) or the unexpected (Beyonce and Jimi Hendrix). What makes one artist better than another is not just their technical skill in matching tempos and keys but in the musicality of the results. Do they sound like songs? On this particular collection I'm unfamiliar with about half the source tracks which verifies my conviction that Mr. Vidler is a genius: the tracks sound seamless and if I didn't know they were plundered and mixed I would have thought they were just catchy songs.

Highlights, of which there are many, include "Morzepplin" (Morcheeba/Led Zeppelin/ CCS), "Daytrip to Heaven" (Belinda Carlisle/The Beatles), and "Nobody Makes The Sweet Jam Taste Better" (too many to name). "Christmas On the Block" mixes JLO and Paul McCartney and manages to make Jenny sound more fake and condescending than the original. I could go on and on - every track is a little masterpiece.

Did I mention this is free? So there is absolutely no good reason not to get this before it goes away. The consolation is that when this goes away, something else will replace it. I'm already in line.

Posted 16 August 2005.