Pogo!

Glyph

Glyph is worse than some and better than others. He believes that life is just one damned thing after another, that only pop music can save us now, and that mercy is the mark of a great man (but he's just all right). Nothing he writes here should be taken as an indication that he knows anything about anything.

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16 Responses

  1. Jason says:

    Pogo’s pretty incredible. In terms of his Disney works, I’ve got to add shout-outs to Upular, Expialidocious, and Alice.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Jason says:

      I won’t say everything he does always grabs me; but the best of his work reminds me of the dense sample-tapestries of Paul’s Boutique, or the musicality and emotional impact of Entroducing.

      Here’s a track that just barely missed the cut for the post, only because it didn’t have a video. But the song is too pretty to miss:

      https://youtu.be/Snszjy_HT4AReport

      • Jason in reply to Glyph says:

        I hadn’t heard that one before – quite nice!

        I don’t think I’ve been 100% in sync with any artist, but that’s hardly the point, right? Each of my favorites manages to pull something out of the world and distill it into an essence that connects with me. For Pogo, I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but is has to do with the sheer pleasure of reveling in an emotion while suppressing the instinct towards cynicism. But that’s probably just me.Report

        • Glyph in reply to Jason says:

          That’s a good way of putting it. There is a very childlike joy evoked for me here, not just from the sample sources themselves, but from the discovery that all these little fragments can be so effectively repurposed and woven into something so musical.

          I also like that he keeps the pieces mostly short, which isn’t always the norm when you are dealing with electronic-based music – not that I mind length, but I think the relative brevity of these makes it easier to perceive how carefully-crafted they are (while managing to seem intuitive and unstudiedly effortless).

          I wouldn’t mind seeing him produce a record with or for somebody else, just to see what he comes up with; though in today’s legal climate, using so many recognizable, high-profile samples means that he would have to significantly alter his usual M.O. That’s why a lot of his work is available on a “free” or pay-what-you-want basis, to provide a fig leaf of protection.Report

    • Glyph in reply to Chris says:

      Oh yeah, that one is amazing. Not sure how I left that one off the post, actually, so I’m glad you brought it up.

      (Also, can I just hire you as my Twitter hype man?)Report

  2. North says:

    I’d second the recommendation for Alice though my favorite pogo work is “Go out and Love Someone” though that one is somewhat off his normal mishmash norm since he includes so more lengthy clips.Report

  3. krogerfoot says:

    Have you seen this? It’s been a few years, but the sheer resourcefulness of Kutiman’s projects blow my decrepit mind every time.Report

    • Glyph in reply to krogerfoot says:

      Oh yeah, his stuff is awesome too. If anything that’s got to be even harder to fit together, since it seems like he pretty much leaves his sample sources mostly alone, whereas Pogo might be software-manipulating stuff slightly (pitch/tempo/duration) to get it all to slot in.

      Though Pogo is often constructing his primary “melodies” from disparate voices, instead of just letting any one single voice or another take the lead.

      Any way you slice it, it’s damned impressive.Report

      • krogerfoot in reply to Glyph says:

        Yes, that’s what I like about Kutiman. He exhaustively sifts through lots of stuff and fits it together in endlessly inventive ways. It’s also admirably democratic, the way he mines some nugget from a kid’s trumpet lesson and puts it right next to Bernard Purdie.

        I’m getting into Pogo, I think, but I’ll have to let a few days go by before I can listen to it properly. It’s late here. Glad you’re back.Report

        • Glyph in reply to krogerfoot says:

          I’ve been pretty slammed at work and will be for the foreseeable future, so Wednesday Music posts will be a rotating rogue’s gallery of posters (and as always, if you wanted to guest post, you’d be welcome) for a while.

          We need to do a listening party soon, I have really let those fall to the wayside.Report

  4. Kazzy says:

    The Cracked podcast did an episode recently on the way sound fucks with our minds and one of the things they did was play an audio recording of a woman speaking back over and over (with some edits to the length of the snippet) and it immediately became evident as “music”… but what is music other than an organized repetition of sounds? Or, perhaps, I should say that it became a song or song-line because our general approach to making songs is to repeat sounds in a predictable manner. And they showed this by, again, just taking a snippet of a woman talking — no instrumentation, nothing melodic about the initial recording — and playing it on repeat. Crazy!

    More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_6l7nQguYEReport