There’s definite shortage of terminology when it comes to describing one of my favorite forms of pop media, i.e.: the mashup. We’ve touched on the genre of music that for lack of a better term is called a “mashup” before, and pointed you to cool artists like Kutiman, who kind of takes it to a new level by creating very musical video collages with elaborate resampling of music tutorials and demos from YouTube. But there’s not only a definite shortage of terminology for discussing this form of expression, some would question whether or not it’s even music. Especially in the case of work by either Pogo or Tasman Richardson. Pogo has recently been getting some attention for his musical video collages, most recently Skynet Symphonic (video below) which is assembled primarily from using selected non-musical sounds from the movie Terminator 2 to make music. A purist of this genre might say Pogo “cheats” a bit by adding synth lines and pitch-controlling the samples to make things more “musical”. For something a little more “hardcore”, both in terms of using pure editing to get results, as well as the resulting musical style, you might check out Tasman Richardson’s work, like Vader Lives (clip below) which is – as Richardson puts it – a “Breakcore homage to the Dark Lord Himself”. Richardson has a body of work stretching back to 1996 which can be found in quicktime on his site or on his YouTube channel. He has also created a term for the type of media he’s creating and defined it in his Jawa Manifesto (1.2MB PDF). The only other artist I’m aware of that does this with any finesse is Robin Koerts, who has done remixes using Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (also below). If you know of any others creating this kind of work feel free to share.

Skynet Symphonic by Pogo

Vader Lives by Tasman Richardson

Pulp Fiction Audio Mix by Robin Koerts