Shapeshifting

Each of the artists on this mix have one thing in common: their music plays on genre and utilizes it as a discrete parameter to be modulated. They have a love for it's malleable nature and the act of conjoining disparate musical elements.

Some composers have integrated their material so well into a seamless combination the harmony is surprising and beautiful in it's novelty. Many of the selections are brutally stitched together at the butt-ends, like the work of a nervous field medic trying to determine which limb belongs to whom before either one goes bad. Other writers deliberately attempt to forge new genres out of disparate elements by perverting their characteristics into an extreme and sometimes unrecognizable caricatures not even their mother's would recognize.

There are virtuosic displays of hocketing and more than a fiver's worth of dime-sized pivots into completely unrelated territory. In one case the music cycles through samples so quickly the mind has trouble keeping up in the torrent of information; continually recognizing the content three moves after it has passed.

Incidentally, many of these songs may function as dense histories of the last century's popular music; as though one were lifted from a remote point in time and placed before a wall of televisions full of shifting imagery. The audience is exposed to a kaleidoscopic array of scenes in a radical attempt to acclimate them to the present.

The method of bombardment featured in so many of these recordings is exciting and eye-opening in the breadth of material on display. If a listener were to single out a single element and investigate it's origins they could easily become overwhelmed by it's own rich history and context.

The attitude taken towards this style of composition varies considerably. Many hold a reverence for the material that came before; a kind of respect and understanding of the traditions they are co-opting. While these songs play it straight there others which adopt a cheeky playfulness and irreverence attitude. Others threaten to sprain an eyelid from winking so hard at the audience.

This mix is dedicated to the bizarre juxtapositions, the cut-ups, mash-ups, the genre-benders, and those suffering from an extreme case of schizophrenic/schizoid behavior.

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