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I generally don't think much of mashups. Some of them are really creative--"The Ghosts That Feeds," combining Ray Parker Jr's "Ghostbusters" and Nine Inch Nails' "The Hand That Feeds" is brilliant, as is the entire-musical-spectrum-raping insanity of Pittsburgh's Girl Talk--but for the most part, mashups are almost always poorly-thought-out, and even more poorly-executed exercises in the cut'n'paste aesthetic that Negativland and Emergency Broadcast Network pioneered but few, few, can master as well.
WHA?! Studios latest mashup monsterpiece, Summer of Love 2008, proves that there are brilliant mashup artists Out There who can combine elements of various songs into mind-melting frankensongs that manage to transcend the mere sum of their parts. Yeah, it's cool to hear Jim Morrison's laconic vocals from "Rider On The Storm" synced up to Blondie's "Rapture," but are you prepared for the sheer musical chimerism of "Buffalo Springfield VS 808 State VS Deee-Lite VS Prince VS Duran Duran"? Because that's exactly what "What's That Sound?" by World Famous Audio Hacker, on Summer of Love 2008 is.
The whole idea behind Summer of Love 2008 can be succinctly described in the words of WHA?!'s press-release for the comp: "[Summer of Love 2008] is our tribute to the second Summer of Love, the acid house and rave culture which started 20 years ago in the UK. It was just as important as the first Summer of Love in the late 60's. So we took songs from the Flower Power era and we took songs from the Acid House Revolution and mashed them together." And that's exactly what you get. Album opener, "Step Together," by the brilliantly-named Phil RetroSpector, combines the Happy Mondays with The Beatles, while "Pinball Wizard in the Drivers Seat" splices together elements from The Who, Dogtooth, and Cook's County. I'd have to say this is my favorite track, because it turns The Who's "Pinball Wizard," one of my alltime favorite Who tracks, into a synthpop dancefloor destroyer that sounds more like a strange, contemporary remake of the song rather than a traditional remix. Bobby Martini's "Here Comes the Sunscreem" is a seamless mercuric amalgamation of Sunscreem and The Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun." Though sometimes the vocals don't quite match up with the music, it's still an incredibly ballsy track that will electrify hippies and britpop fans alike and will keep dancefloors rocking. Flying White Dots' shiversome "Land of Oz" is a beautiful, almost ambient space/dance/trance track built from pieces of Manuel Gottsching, Latino, Grace Jones, Pink Floyd, The Orb, Opus 3, Björk, Masters At Work, and The freakin' KLF to boot! We're talking ten minutes of space music so lush and mindblowing it proves, beyond any shadow of a doubt...this one track proves that music is better than acid for achieving altered states of mind. Yes. There. I said it. It's my story and I'm sticking to it!
Again, what makes this compilation work so well is that it's not a one-trick pony. Yes, it's built around a basic gimmick, combining music from two different eras, flowerchildren plus early rave culture, blah blah blah--but it only uses that gimmick as a starting point, not an endpoint. These individual tracks achieve much, much more than simply stitching together the familiar hooks from a bunch of random pop songs from the late '60s and the late '80s/early '90s. The combination of Summers of Love produces vibrant new music, not merely zombie tracks consisting of reanimated samples from old songs. A few of them, the first two tracks in particular, sound like remixes--but good remixes that do what remixes should do: create all new songs out of the components of previous tracks. But the other tracks...the other tracks are truly unique examples of, and triumphs of, the mashup genre.
Best of all...the entire EP is free! Free as Love! First, you can listen to all songs in streaming format at the album's homepage, then you can download the entire album here (Divshare link), or, even better, you can download it as a torrent. Plus, the torrent version contains a special extra: "The Caravan of Love Collection is the bonus gift of the Summer of Love 2008 compilation. Each artist from the album has designed a VW bus and you can find them in a handy print ready booklet feature in the zip file. Print them all and set up your very own Caravan of Love!" That's right, you get a collection of papercraft microbuses to print out, fold up, and display proudly in your cubicle while you blow your coworkers minds with the psycherobodelic sounds of Summer of Love 2008!
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