Pogo!
Pogo – Forget
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOreqez4v9Y?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
Music is, at root and among other things, simply organized sound. Rhythms and/or notes, arranged in a particular way with the intent to communicate something about the mind that did the organizing, or the mind perceiving the organizing, or the universe that the minds share.
Pogo is Nick Bertke, an Aussie electronic music producer who has worked a very specific niche for many years now – he takes tiny snippets of music, sound effects and dialogue from movies and television, and weaves them into playful, hyper-colorful fractal songs that are composed almost entirely of those fragments.
I’ve been a little obsessed with his earworm-filled “Forget” lately. It’s a boundless glittering mosaic, built from tiny multicolored sound shards.
If you can, do what he does when listening to the main vocal melody – ignore the words (they are meaningless, chosen simply for sound, feel and tone), and focus simply on its twisty and intricate progression; a whimsical, graceful dance of notes.
It’s perhaps indicative of the obvious creativity of his work that even the notoriously-aggressive legal teams of major entertainment conglomerates like Disney (a frequent sample source) have pretty much left him alone:
Pogo – Wishery
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1bG6BIYlo?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
In fact, in some cases they have gone beyond laissez-faire, and actively commissioned him to do work for them.
He did an officially-sanctioned one for Pixar’s Up; though I prefer this one:
Pogo – Boo Bass
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0W1ULoLs6Cg?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
This one was commissioned for for Showtime’s Dexter, so possibly slightly-NSFW:
Pogo – Crimson
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVS1-yjXeSY?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
That last one may have been slightly NSFW; this next one is comprised of profane Pulp Fiction samples, so it is entirely NSFW:
Pogo – Lead Breakfast
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7Ad1AuHriI?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
This one is built from A.I. samples; appropriately, instead of a video showing film snippets from the Spielberg/Kubrick masterpiece (yeah, I said it – come at me, bro), we get to see the “code” in all its player-piano, puzzle-piece glory; IMO, seeing these sounds-as-shapes getting stacked into song is just as fascinating:
Pogo – Just Blue Fairy
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT0FsWk3Zfs?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
Here’s the man behind the curtain:
Pogo – Wizard of Meh
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fk2BaM1la0?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
After listening to Pogo, it’s overwhelming to realize all of the potential music that we have around us, every second of every day; if only we could just stop and hear it.
Pogo – Kenya Chords
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4_gElRkPjo?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
Pogo – One Day With You
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkf8G-QvP_A?rel=0&vq=hd720&w=560&h=315]
Pogo’s pretty incredible. In terms of his Disney works, I’ve got to add shout-outs to Upular, Expialidocious, and Alice.Report
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
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
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
I love this one too:
https://youtu.be/FRSr0GprIIwReport
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
Dude, I’ve been waiting like 2 weeks to Tweet about Pogo, so I’m psyched.
But if you want to pay me money, I will take it.Report
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
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
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
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
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
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
One of the posts I have never been able to finish was about repetition in music, as a sort of jumping off point to talk about repetition in general, and how it is intimately interwoven with how we experience and understand the universe. It got kind of…philosophical, I guess? Maybe one day I can get it together.Report
You are forgiven.Report
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