Mash-Ups by Brian Joseph Davis

The folk tool of the mash up has been an excellent means for dissolving percieved cultural barriers between pop songs and genres. Yet these tools—-quantizing and beat matching, little or no editing—-are rarely used for the conflation of disparate histories. For example, the discrepancy between bare-chested 1970s rock and free jazz, or minimalist drone. Having lucked into a bit torrent of very clean master drum tracks from Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti, I thought the best thing to do was to invite collaborations that never happened, or might have happened if Bonham lived and began hanging out at Tonic.

Bonham Collaboration A
Bonham: drums, Sainkho Namtchylak: vocals; Peter Brotzmann: saxophone; Caspar Brotzmann: guitar.
A Siberian opera singer with father and son giants of German free jazz combine for something that sounds like Flipper with government funding.

Bonham Collaboration B
Bonham: drums; Sun Ra: synthesizer
“And all the music which represents only the past, is for museums of the past.” Sun Ra.

Bonham Collaboration C
Bonham: drums; Charlemagne Palestine: piano
Here, Charlemagne Palestine’s minimalist piano is brought in and out of phase against a reasonable facsimile of Klaus Dinger.

Brian Joseph Davis is a Toronto based sound artist and writer. His work has been collected on the recent Blocks Recording Club release The Definitive Host. He's the author of Portable Altamont, about which Spin Magazine wrote, “An elegant, wise-ass rush of truth, hiding riotous social commentary in slanderous jokes." He also writes fake gossip for Arthur Magazine.