A couple of years ago I was asked by Dave Roepke from the Fargo Forum to create a holiday music Mash-up for a story he wanted to run about how dj's are keeping their music fresh season-by-season. Below is a reprint of the article and a link to my submitted recording, Dr. Demento's Xmas Mashup. Christmas is coming... as are Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and the rest. Happy holidays.REPRINTED FROM THE FORUM:
It’s mix & mash
Holiday songs get new spin
By Dave Roepke droepke@forumcomm.com
The popularity of mash-ups – songs formed from tracks or snippets of other songs – is made clear to DJ Joyride every Friday night on his weekly radio show [The F-M Experiment].
“That’s when I get the most phone calls,” says Joyride, whose real name is Nicholas Goodroad. “Mash-ups have been getting a lot of play lately.”
Goodroad says DJs like them as well because they’re an easy way to introduce listeners to the techno and other beat-centric music they love. They hope to draw people in with the pop song and hook them on the underlying rhythm.
The same can be done with Christmas music. It’s popular for big-city club DJs to create complete Christmas-themed sets, Goodroad says. The Forum asked local DJs and a veteran mixer to do just that, albeit on a smaller scale.
Go online to [link removed] to check out these Christ-mashes. They describe their choices below:
DJ Joyride Dr. Demento's Xmas Mashup
“I do like holiday music. I get really into it,” Goodroad says.
But he wanted to tap into a sound that wouldn’t be on a typical Christmas mix. A Dr. Demento version of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” fit the bill.
The childlike ditty formed the base for the first half of Goodroad’s piece, with “The Little Drummer Boy,” performed by Dave Koz featuring Rick Braun, in the background and an introductory passage sampling Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”
Picking up the pace a little to match the tempo, the end portion of the track Goodroad titled “Demento Xmas Mashup” melds Dean Martin’s rendition of “Let It Snow” with beats from Latryx’s “Lady Don’t Tek No” and a brief chunk of “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice.
“I took the [most interesting] pieces from each song and constructed them like a puzzle,” Goodroad says.
Mason Loke - Concrete X-Massive
Loke is an English/Music Composition student at Minnesota State University Moorhead who has mixed for about seven years.
“I got a sampler and found out I’d probably been missing something in my life,” he says.
Asked to produce a Christmas mash-up, the first thing that sprang to Loke’s mind was the first six measures of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” a number from The Nutcracker ballet.
“When I think Christmas, I think ‘The Nutcracker,’ and that’s my favorite movement,” he says.
Loke added a live drum and bass beat behind the sample, as well as some piano to flesh out the crackly “toy” piano of the original recording.
“I’d describe it as a remix of those first six measures,” Loke says of his track, “Concrete X-Massive.”
DJ Guy Jean - [RECORDINGS NOT AVAILABLE]
Mark Weiler, who performs as DJ Guy Jean multiple nights a week at Fargo clubs, contributed two mash-ups for the project.
The more obviously mixed of the pair is a dark, dreamy combination of Elvis Presley singing “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and “Aftermath,” a classic track from British trip-hop artist Tricky.
It’s more difficult – at least until the scratching kicks in – to hear what’s mashing with what on Weiler’s second selection. Like Goodroad, Weiler employed “Lady Don’t Tek No” by Latryx. The holiday portion is a rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer” performed by The Temptations.
Readers can reach Forum reporter
Dave Roepke at (701) 241-5535
DJ Joyride's Submission: Dr. Demento's Xmas Mashup - http://icedbreaks.com/snd/Dimento%20XMas%20Mashup.mp3
Mason Loke's Submission: Concrete X-Massive.mp3 - http://icedbreaks.com/snd/Concrete%20X-Massive.mp3
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