Be Ear Now

The grand old art of the mash-up returns in emphatic style this fortnight, with a couple of cool new clips from the worlds of music and film that are worth wasting your time over. What better way to usher in 2011 than by listening to a bunch of 2010’s biggest pop songs all crammed together into 4 minutes? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. Head to www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q6JtpqyXmE to check out DJ Earworm’s United State of Pop 2010, where he seamlessly splices together 12 months of hits. Though not quite up to the standards of his 2009 entry (www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNzrwh2Z2hQ - a masterpiece, essentially) he still somehow manages to make Justin Bieber sound palatable this year.
Anyone who thinks that sticking a bunch of old movie clips together is hardly high art has clearly never seen ‘Pure’ over at vimeo.com/12133254. Portentously described as “a meditation on violence and visual tropes at the movies [which] celebrates the visceral pleasures of cinema”, it is essentially an excuse to stick together video of the likes of Bruce, Arnie and Clint looking menacing and kicking arse along with video of cars and helicopters (and people) exploding. And all to a Jesus Lizard soundtrack. A must-see for anyone who watches Die Hard a little too often.
Of course, you could always come up with something yourself. Reckon you have what it takes to create the new Lolcats or Advice Dog? If so, put your fingers where your mouth is and click through to The Meme Generator at memegenerator.net. Select a picture, add some witty text, upload and wait for it to become an internet phenomenon. At the very least you can wile away a few minutes (or weeks) looking at other people’s creations. Any meme involving Bear Grylls is generally tickling our fancy at the moment. Most are basically a picture of him alongside a line like “I have plenty of water… time to drink my own piss.” High art.
If you fancy expressing yourself musically with the least effort possible then The Sound Matrix www.sembeo.com/sound-matrix is for you. This synthesizer flash program is a grid of tiny clickable boxes, and putting any kind of haphazard pattern together generates some impossibly lovely and melodic music. It’s the same idea as the Tenori-On electronic instrument used by artists such as Little Boots, only instead of costing a couple of hundred quid, it’s free.