Kutiman mixes YouTube

Experimental film project? Genius cut n paste production? The pioneering ThruYOU phenomenon has became a cult web hit and ushers in a new online art-form, using the available technology to such great effect it has quickly become a definitive expression of it. Editing unrelated YouTube clips together to create 7 original songs, Kutiman, aka producer Ophir Kutiel from Israel, has taken sampling to a new dimension. In a painstaking process that took two months of continual immersion in thousands of YouTube clips, seeking the obscure and the unknown, the clips that fit the beat and were also visually arresting, Kutiman created a virtual band of hundreds of soloists, which mesmerizingly transcends the sum of its parts.

Kutiman-ThruYOU - 01 - Mother of All Funk Chords

Here and there, the players seem to call out to each other, jamming across time zones and existences. ThruYOU is a portal to undiscovered raw talent, and also to a dizzying line-up of synth geeks, garage drummers, kitchen harpists, and lo-fi dreamers. Kutiman has done an awesome job composing his songs by selecting and editing the clips. Many of them were recorded in bedrooms and back yards, and are intensely personal performances. The overall effect of the project is intimate and moving - what could have turned into a parody of their amateur efforts feels more like a tribute and Kutiman has said he was drawn to searching for clips featuring individuals he felt an affinity with.

Kutiman-ThruYOU - 07 - Just a Lady

Few online projects actually deliver on the internet’s democratizing promise like this one. ThruYOU wasn’t conceived as an album and so is not selling a product. And rather than rendering them anonymous, Kutiman credits all the participants and, having generated over a million hits, has given the unsuspecting players an extraordinary platform…if indeed they want it. Their motivations for uploading their clips in the first place must be as diverse as the content. ThruYOU is a project full of heart, made intuitively, in the spirit of collaboration. It’s a project by and for a generation of artists and, well, regular folks, with the impulse to participate and contribute and connect and wasn’t that what the internet was supposed to be all about?

www.thru-you.com
www.myspace.com/kutiman

Jody Gillett

ThruYOU - I’m New

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