Vibiant

REMODELED X MINUS ONE; THE CONQUEST OF LIGHT MUSIC; MORE ILLUMINATION ON THE REMODELED 

Remodeled music, for the uninitiated, is music created from the “whole cloth”, as it were, of other music, as opposed to the much more discrete sampling that audio collage artists employ, but then again, Remodeled music is much more complicated than “mash-ups” or “bootlegs”, because of the multitude of musical sources employed within each Remodeled song.  Constructed with great care, Remodeled songs reduced source material to a kind of quantum iconography, a kind of phenomenological shorthand.  Individual song sources are folded into each other, Betty Crocker-style’, to hearken back to the “hidden stories” within media, the small snippets that once were original productions that would be otherwise lost in the greater sea of the Pancultural Medium.  This multi-source approach also distances Remodeled music from remixing, since each sound source is meant to be individually recognizable, unlike the use of generic musical elements employed in remixing.  Remodeled music was specifically constructed to generate recognition, but not to deify the original artist, like a re-mix would.   Bear in mind that no part of the songs in Remodeled music are generic.  No free beats, no fair use samples.  Everything was taken from something else, some other artistic perturbation from the Pancultural Medium.  

Stylistically, Remodeled Music is not supposed to sound so much like any one particular style as  much as it is supposed to forge ahead into new musical territories.  Remodeled Music takes advantage of the fact that advertising agencies know what the hell they are doing.  Those songs from TV commercials are supposed to stick in your head, become a part of your daily train of thought.  Remodeled Music hijacks that train, culling commercial music whole, announcers and all, yanking on various music-memory centers in your brain, weaving together a new memory from the old.  Truth be told, the vast majority of  music that has found its way onto the television advertising stage was not created for the advertisers, it was in fact licensed from other musicians for used in those commercials.   Those original songs have names, have histories, now very complicated ones, since the TV and radio show producers who got them first had to search for them, then we did, adding to the tale of “where did these samples come from?”.  It has become a very rich history, where the samples are sampled again and again over time to ultimately form this album Remodeled X minus 1.   However,  the proof that these sources were recorded “off air” and not researched back to their original iterations appears in  the form of the announcers and actors within the commercials, now hawking away within the smooth musical flow of the album itself.  These additional layers of musical complexity, who are rarely allowed to complete an advertising thought or even complete sentence, speak volumes as to the nature of our advertising culture, and the smaller, but still significant, audio sampling culture.  Why does a 30 second ad have better music in it than do the songs on the  radio?  Must avant garde audio collage be musically unapproachable?  Is audio collage any less artistically significant than, say, a Robert Rauchenberg collage?  Remodeled music may not have all the answers, but it does make the listener think about the questions. 

Contact me at paul@vibiant.com

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