Eclectic Method

So last night i figured why not just tweet at Jay Z and Life + Times to see if they seen 99 Problems in film yet, worth a shot. BUT what huge hip hop icon actually checks their twitter and shit, as it turns out Jay Z cos he posted it on his facebook and twitter 20 minutes later. Ridic.

Sometimes writing a blog I feel a bit like Doogie Howser , who the *&^% is reading Doogie's diary or is it for Doogie to reflect on later in life? I mean his TV Show is documenting most of it surely? But anyway i digress, as i was recently reminded a bunch of folk read this part of the site so i'll write on about the side notes to EM. Just a few days ago I finished Jay Z's 99 Problem's in film, 99 Problems but the lyrics rebuilt from film clips. A few weeks ago i saw Matthijs Vlot's excellent Hello , Lionel Richie's Hello but rebuilt with film clips and i thought "Oh MAN i wanna do that with a hip hop tune". I choose 99 Problems cos frankly if you ain't heard that one, where you been? and everyone knows the lyrics, a bit. I would like to point out that i used subzin which helps you find any dialouge in almost any film (i know it spoils the magic but i don't like not sharing knowledge and that site needs RESPECT). So I finished 99 Problems Sunday night and in my excitement i told Romain over at Dailymotion who kindly gave it a little push and pretty quickly 100 people a minute were watching it, even though the grammys were on,  i know i timed that badly. So completely forgetting it was the grammys i emailed ?uestlove who has like 4 billion twitter followers, he put it away because he was at the time about to present part of the Grammys (i know i'm total twat) and then yesterday he tweeted out the video. Now, not that we didn't have a bunch of traffic already but I wanted to explain the insane impact that Questo has on the interwebs. Within minutes of him tweeting it the RT's and viewing spiked like a colbert bump on speed.

Questo is a crazy force of nature, i wanted to write about my brief experience of him cos he's interesting. I wanna state that in total i've spoken to him a few times on the phone and spent about 40 minutes with him when we were on the late night show with him, so he's not my mate but everytime he's just briefly done anything with me it's been to help me out. I've supported him at Webster Hall, been on the Summit Series Cruise with him and played jimmy fallon with him, Clyde Stubblefield and Chuck D (i know i'm a lucky MFer). I first heard about The Roots from my mate Anthony Tidd who is a producer/composer/musician who moved to Philly when i was young but would come back and tell us stories of the Philly scene and house /recording studio of musicians constantly creating stuff. Peeps like Rahzel , Jill Scott, Badu who then exploded onto the world and i got to see them at festivals and clubs after hearing stories from America from Anthony from his being witht hem, at this point i had never even been to the states so it was a magical far away land to me. Also i became aware of the mighty OkayPlayer and just the extentuating web of coolness omitting from the Roots clan. The Roots are the inhouse band for Jimmy Fallon, which bearing in mind the trumpet blerrr of pretty much every other crass band on late night, is ridiculously cool. Beyond that they use that as a base to launch, support and do more cool shit. Questlove seems to move quickly through the global media landscape from his base at 30 rock. Which leads me to ?uestlove doesn't sleep. My one working experience with him was doing Jimmy Fallon last year when we rebuilt PE's "Fight The Power" to play on JF's show . Due to a misunderstanding i had attempted to build the tune without any drums to leave space for ?uestlove and Clyde Stubblefield, leaving it hollow from the orignal. ?uestlove realized this late in the evening the night before the show and called me up and tells me he still has stuff to do but will get in studio tonight and rebuild it with the drums. I figured that meant like 11pm. At 4am he calls me bright as a daisy explains what he's doing and that he'd see me at 8am, you can follow his tweets all throughout the night and he hasn't stopped. So just putting it out there i have a theory that ?uestlove don't sleep and is a robot. A super cool robot.

"The Art of fighting without fighting" Just finished the Enter The Dragon remix last night and also a brief dubstep version of the President's state of the Union title "Dubstate Of The Union". Been meaning to do Enter The Dragon for a while and what with the new year of the Dragon now in place it seemed like the right time. There are a bunch of EM Kung Fu Beats remixes from over the years but it hasn't been that long that it's been possible to get such classics in HD. Also the original theme song by Lalo Schifrin is off the charts funky awesome, I took it apart rebuilt some of his riffs with synths and beefed up the beat. An extended instrumental is up on the EM Soundcloud page. Dubstate Of The Union is a bit short, i just got a brief amount of it last night and wanted to cut up something fast (was up within 2 hours) but it's just a rough test (hence it not being up on the main EM channel) more Primary/Main Election mixing is coming soon. Was totally inspired by this Mondon Newshit video. We just got in a bunch of Limited Edition EM USB Dongles, so limited we're not gonna sell them but hand out at shows. Heading off this weekend to play for MacWorld with A-Skills and Motion Potion. Then back to the LAB so i can make, ooo ooo ooo.

A huge part of the EM Live show is Acapella Videos. Basically Music Videos reconstructed so they have just the vocal acapella on them (no bass, no beat, no instruments etc). By doing this we can drop any video over any track and create live mixes depending on setting tone vibe. Over the coming months I'm gonna start sharing EM's archive of acapella videos online for other video DJs to collect and jam with. I will also put up some of the original video files, stuff like greenscreen footage, from our collaborations so more folk can make their own video remixes and versions. As a sort of a kick off have just put up a video acapella for Childish Gambino's "Put It In My Video". Will put more and more stuff up in the coming months and will update on EM Twitter/Facebook/Google+ and so forth until we gradually just get the acapellavideos site in state where you can just go there to grab it.

Just got back last night from San Francisco , stayed in Fisherman's Wharf and played at the ex Army Barracks at Fort Mason, overlooking Alcatraz for Alienware. Totally joyous break from the NY cold and got to shoot many things in virtual gaming land. Thanks to everyone who came to the show and tuned in online.

Wow first blog posted of the new year, i have been distracted. Happy Belated New Year. Whats been occuring? I made a video remix for Justin's daughter's first year, being a HD cam owning dad he managed to capture a lot of his daughters first year. I'll probably remix her second year and so on until it becomes blatantly too embarrassing for her. Beyonce and Jay Z had their daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, here's the remix to celebrate....baby. Been completely distracted with learning After Effects. Most of my initial tests are in such bad taste or sick humor that wouldn't dare share them online. Been working with Dan Wise recently and he has led me to learn the deep (Dark) side of After Effects, firstly video through the awesome Video Copilot lessons from Andrew Kramer. Also one of my closest friends, Greg Deocampo, is kinda the inventor of After Effects so he is both super psyched i'm finally getting into it and generating offensive generatables himself. BUT, we will soon be releasing a video that is not too offensive for the interwebs and also we just finishing up a video we made with Dan for Social Media Week. Tuesday i'll be in San Francisco to play for a Alienware event, will be playing special Alien AV Set off two Alienware laptops , Serato and Mixvibes, did i mention it was all totally #alienware.

So Gaffta was celebrating it's new site in San Francisco on Thursday night at the Warfield (which is just next door...to their new site). I went to play the party and enjoy some slightly warmer cali weather. Got through 2 of the 3 course meal whilst checking out the start of the night. Amongst other things they showed the work of Aaron Koblin and his team at Google Creative Arts. The digital visualtions of a day of airtraffic is totally awesome real data based art.

We got given Jerry Garcia's old dressing room which still has his name prominently displayed on the door, JB was psyched obviously.

Then checked out Garibaldi's live painting to Elew's performance, the paintings were on auction right after. Elew is totally shit hot, rockjazz piano mash , brilliant stuff. I did an hour at the end of a more laid back internet meme-y/film mix set and then retired to bed to drink water and not dream of sugar. Am attempting this diet that is basically cutting out all sugar, and i'm totally addicted to sugar. Now back in Brooklyn with nothing but studio production time till NYE show in NYC. I been waiting to confirm outloud that we restarting NYCWTF nights in Williamsburg Brooklyn February 2011, but still waiting for Mark to update the site yo!