Kutiman gets his/your jazz on.
February 11, 2016 5:36 AM Subscribe
Kutiman has dropped his new video album: OFF GRID (YouTube version here).
"In this new work, Kutiman utilizes his unique method of carefully blanketing together YouTube users' original content into one natural and cohesive audio-visual experience. This time around, Kutiman plays with the concept of expanded time, musical complexity and intricate layering while adding special visual effects to create a new perspective of the Jazz genre."
And once again he doesn't list the names of the people without whom he would have no compositions. I know that there are links to the original videos with annotations turned on, but that means the onus is on me, the viewer, to click through each individual link to find out whose videos he has appropriated, rather than on him, the appropriator, to give explicit credit where it is due. They're not even in the meta tags on his website or in the description of the video.
There's no doubt he is a talented mash-up artist, but come on, even GirlTalk lists all of the artists he uses in plain text, which is indexed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:59 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
There's no doubt he is a talented mash-up artist, but come on, even GirlTalk lists all of the artists he uses in plain text, which is indexed.
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:59 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
(Kutiman originally on MetaFilter)
And I agree on his questionable attributions - I find the annotations are actually a distraction to the video, which makes me want to turn them off rather than follow the links. And because they're just links to other YouTube videos with only an instrument as reference for what's on the other end, if the linked videos are made private or deleted, any real credit to those artists are gone from this video.
That puts the onus on someone else to document these. I just checked Discogs to see if anyone had credited the sampled musicians on Thru-YOU, and they haven't. (Full disclosure - I entered those releases on Discogs, so it's partially on me for being lazy when first entering in information. I could probably be safe to guess those artists don't have other works on Discogs, so I would have had to create new artists for each credit, but I didn't, and here we are.)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:32 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
And I agree on his questionable attributions - I find the annotations are actually a distraction to the video, which makes me want to turn them off rather than follow the links. And because they're just links to other YouTube videos with only an instrument as reference for what's on the other end, if the linked videos are made private or deleted, any real credit to those artists are gone from this video.
That puts the onus on someone else to document these. I just checked Discogs to see if anyone had credited the sampled musicians on Thru-YOU, and they haven't. (Full disclosure - I entered those releases on Discogs, so it's partially on me for being lazy when first entering in information. I could probably be safe to guess those artists don't have other works on Discogs, so I would have had to create new artists for each credit, but I didn't, and here we are.)
posted by filthy light thief at 7:32 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
You mean, so the musicians might get their own documentary more efficiently?
I feel he's always been very gracious about the players in his virtual musical collective - and it's kind of sad that this is the first reaction his creativity elicits by now, around here. But: we've been thru this, and I don't really have anything to add.
posted by progosk at 8:45 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
I feel he's always been very gracious about the players in his virtual musical collective - and it's kind of sad that this is the first reaction his creativity elicits by now, around here. But: we've been thru this, and I don't really have anything to add.
posted by progosk at 8:45 AM on February 11, 2016 [2 favorites]
Oh, and: see/hear for yourself what being part of his album meant for one singer, Samantha Montgomery (stick with it, through a couple of minutes of Dutch intro).
posted by progosk at 12:15 AM on February 12, 2016
posted by progosk at 12:15 AM on February 12, 2016
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posted by progosk at 5:43 AM on February 11, 2016