Audio-video remixes, cut-ups and more redefine the rules

One of the key moments during “Caught in the Middle of a 3-Way Mix,” a recent 60-minute creative re-edit of the Beastie Boys’ pastiche classic “Paul’s Boutique,” comes a third of the way through: a two-note Beatles guitar/bass/drum sample from the beginning of “The End.”

A tidbit dense with subtext — we’ve heard it, and know the general back story of the four men who created it — once it arrives, the sample stumbles into a loop, repeating awkwardly for a few measures like shoes spinning in a clothes dryer. The moment is jarring in part because the sample is so recognizable — but not just for its Beatles origin.

GRAPHIC: Creative music mash-ups

Too, it’s a classic ingredient in “Paul’s Boutique,” a connection that is reinforced a few beats later, as Beastie Boy Adam Horowitz starts the rap to “The Sounds of Science” and the music below gradually shifts to the clarinet melody from the Beatles’ “When I’m 64.”

These few seconds are one of hundreds of such creative re-imaginings on “Caught in the Middle,” which is one of my favorite musical endeavors of the year. Built by three British DJs — Moneyshot, Cheeba and Food — the audio collage is seamlessly puzzled together into a thrilling whole from shards of the Beastie Boys’ 1989 rap album. It’s also a reminder of a sample culture that in 2012 shows increasing signs of maturing, even as its ubiquity renders its evolution less noticeable. A new generation of artists/editors is mixing audio and video to create increasingly sophisticated edits that explode time, space, medium and message, redefining the rules of sonic pastiche (analogous creation is taking place in literary, art and filmic realms and may well be the signature art of our time).

FOR THE RECORD
Sonic sampling: In the Oct. 28 Arts & Books section, an article about sampling culture said a YouTube user named Hugh Atkin had created a video cut-up of Barack Obama “rapping” new rhymes about Mitt Romney by adapting Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” Atkin’s video was an adaptation of Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady.”

In the case of “Caught in the Middle,” the DJs highlighted brief moments and connected crannies to create what feels like the unspoken history of a music. They crack open the “Egg Man” tom-tom beats that the Beasties swiped from Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” then let Costello’s recording play longer as a way to offer context. They blend in samples from Black Oak Arkansas, Sly & the Family Stone, the Eagles and Tower of Power, swipe sounds from Led Zeppelin, the Meters and Johnny Cash, shock with the string screeches from Alfred Hitchcock’s film composer Bernard Herrmann.

In such an environment, each miniature tone has a contextual history, both as an ingredient in “Paul’s Boutique” and part of a much bigger musical conversation. And by mixing into the beats outtakes and old interview commentary about the album’s creation from the Beasties themselves, the whole adds up to some weird new mutation, a sonic documentary that schools while it bumps along in rhythm. “I don’t remember recording this one. I mean, I know we did, but I don’t remember what happened,” confesses Horowitz, discussing “Johnny Ryall” as the music moves. The result is a kind of blossoming of “Paul’s Boutique” — paying homage to the recording by collaging together more, rather than less, of the stuff that made the record so thrilling.

These days every digitized bit of creativity can be easily manipulated, be it image, text, film or sound — but musicians’ affection for doing so has long set the conversation in pop culture. And combined with the availability of audio and video editing tools, once impossible feats of tedium can be built with similar skills just as quickly. A rap song and video from sampled words and phrases of President Obama now arrive online to little fanfare — unless they happen to go viral. A DJ obsessed with Bollywood horror soundtracks can construct a dynamic 50-minute edit of great moments, as DJ Andy Votel has done on the recent “Hindi Horrorcore,” to offer a quickie sonic tutorial. If Mel Gibson throws another tantrum, expect it to be scored to music soon thereafter.

It’s another step in a chronicle that for the last half-century has morphed as the tools for a cut-and-paste world have made the process as easy as dragging and dropping tidbits of data. Fifty years after William S. Burroughs in a landmark recording of Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique gave voice to the future of sample culture, a new chapter in collage is taking shape.

“When you cut into the present, the future leaks out,” he explained of his mystical take on the potential of sound editing, which “produces new words by altered juxtaposition — just as new words are produced by cut-ups on paper.” Burroughs’ conclusion: “Cut-ups put you in touch with what you know, and what you don’t consciously know you know.” In the case of “Caught in the Middle,” by breaking “Paul’s Boutique” down to its parts and puzzling them back together to craft something else, the DJs have cut into the present, and a storied past has come pouring out.

This cut-up evolution is apparent in the myriad — and increasingly sophisticated — YouTube musical/video montages that marry song and pop culture. In the four years since such work became known as “supercuts” (intricate YouTube clips made by obsessed fans consisting of cliches, phrases or actions creatively edited together), they have become commonplace. In August, a cut-up of “Mad Men” characters working along to Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up” went viral. Another, simpler manifestation is the joyous YouTube supercut of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” which combines dozens of clips of fans singing along. Granted, like all popular media, many lesser supercuts are juvenile, uninspired, or just plain silly. But those with good ideas can execute them with relative ease.

A YouTube user named Hugh Atkin has built brilliant political commentary-cum-musical-supercuts of Barack Obama “rapping” new rhymes about Mitt Romney by adapting Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” (“… but a Mitt ain’t one”). In it, the artist has pieced together Obama’s speeches and public statements to create rhymes that move along with the music. Within hours of the second presidential debate, amateur editors had crafted parodies of Romney’s “binders full of women” comment in service of musical polemics.

The notion has interesting roots. A 1984 project called Bonzo Goes to Washington adapted into a post-disco track called “Five Minutes” a Ronald Reagan sound-check moment about Russia.

Around the same time, John Oswald’s music-crunching “plunderphonics” experiments were beginning to shine a more academic light on creative editing (and angering Michael Jackson’s legal team). He constructed fascinating bursts of sound built from split-second slices of dozens of well-known pop recordings. One called “Huck Cyrber” connected little pieces of various Chuck Berry guitar riffs into a quickie, chaotic “greatest licks.”

Oswald’s goal: filtering what he deemed inessential. “Seventy percent or more of your average pop song is redundant repetition,” he said. “Such a song could be distilled from four minutes or more into less than a minute and nothing would be lost.” It’s a truth that sample-happy party DJ Girl Talk has taken to the extreme in his mash-up mixes.

But as the “3 Way” mix illustrates, the opposite is also true: A two-note Beatles distillation tucked in “Paul’s Boutique” is just as easily expanded as condensed.

Oswald himself proved that in the much admired “Grayfolded,” a maximalist audio supercut (before the technique became known as such) of the Grateful Dead that inverted the ideas of the early plunderphonics pieces: He wove together dozens of different concert versions of “Dark Star” into an all-consuming “definitive” two-hour version. The influential sonic experimenter Christian Marclay — best known for his 24-hour fine art supercut “The Clock” showing regularly at LACMA — did a much smaller but equally magnetic experiment when he wove together a trippy, layered recording of soprano Maria Callas holding the same note for an impossibly long minute.

Copyright holders are, more than ever, turning a blind eye to the use of their work in mixes, supercuts and mash-ups. In many cases, in fact, owners are commissioning the re-edits. One of my favorite records of last year was a double-disc work by electronic producers Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer digging into respected avant-jazz label ECM’s vaults to build new compositions from the work of its artists.

Such sophisticated endeavors used to be the exception, but no more. DJ Cut Chemist made a Fela Kuti supermix from his seminal Afropop recordings, and while it got deserved attention, it was one of many. A sound artist named Chris Lawhorn recently isolated dozens of samples from Washington, D.C., post-punk band Fugazi to create razor-sharp new compositions. These works render once-fresh ideas like the defining 2001 mash-up “A Stroke of Genius,” which coupled a Strokes song with the vocals of Christina Aguilera singing “Genie in a Bottle,” or Danger Mouse’s 2004 marrying of the raps of Jay-Z to music from the Beatles’ “White Album” to create “The Grey Album,” seem quaint and gimmicky in comparison.

As such, these formative works are ready to themselves be plundered in service of more dynamic combinations.

randall.roberts@latimes.com