Coldcut / Hexstatic

So I flipping love Coldcut & Hexstatic. I have learned a lot from many many AV acts but the real reason I got into video sampling/remixing stuff was because of seeing Coldcut & Hexstatic’s “Timber”. Timber was an awesome track made out of video samples and though I am sure there are other great previous examples of AV Remix this was the first time I had ever seen it.

After seeing Timber I wanted to know how to make shit like this. I started using Coldcut/Camart’s VJAMM software which was basically a video sampler, the first EM shows were done using this software and CDJs. Aside from pioneering AV, Coldcut have been none too shabby in their other areas of work, writing bonafide hits for folk like Lisa Stansfield & Yazz in the 80s then using the money to start the NinjaTune record label which is still a staple of hits today. Fatboy Slim credits them with inspiring his route into hit making in this 80’s interview and The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett calls them the inspiration for  “The Dirt Chamber Sessions”. 

Eboman

A while ago when I was getting into AV and thought I was totally pioneering and shit, Matt Black told me to check out this dude called EBOMAN. At that time he was scratching video live with an exoskeleton suit and video sampling people on the spot and remixing them live almost immediately. His team built a pile of custom video sampler effects tech that was initially a plugin for Logic but he’s gone way beyond that in recent years. Check out this video below in which he uses Kinect to place himself into Michael Jackson’s legendary Billie Jean Motown performance. Not only does he go between Michael’s legs but also starts remixing him by manipulating his image with just his hands. 

Self Generating Remix

Self Generating Art has long been an obsession of BRIAN ENO’s. He made the 77 Million Paintings installation, a self generating painting that is always changing and also his work on the KOAN generative music engine.

For the last few years I’ve been obsessed with the idea of a self generating remixer. Something that is generating a real time remix (both audio and video) from media the world is spewing onto the internet. COLDCUT had an app called “My Little Funkit” that would generate music to pre-defined rules and the user could move faders that would make choices as to how to music would develop. I thought this would be a fun idea in a self generating media remixer where someone could come in and choose less news more salacious media stories OR less EDM more hiphop. Also with more and more online videos coming with subtitles and automatic editing machine could be trying to construct remix sentences that make sense. The site SUBZIN already allows you to search films by their scripts and it will tell you exactly where a word or phrase occurs in a movie.