By Dan Gleabals
Cut and Paste VJ renegade Eclectic Method has put together this mental mash-up he calls Meta Hip Hop – and it’s going viral – have a watch and let us know how many Hip Hop classics you spot!
There’s over a hundred clips painstakingly put together. We lost count a long way before 100 though!
Eclectic Method (aka Jonny Wilson) started off as a digital outlaw splicing together music, TV and film, influenced by Brian Eno, Underworld, cut and paste pioneers Coldcut and others he worked with as a teenager on the Pavarotti Centre music project in war-torn Bosnia. The centre, opened by Warchild, invited kids from all sides of the conflict to learn music and heal the pain of the Bosnian war.
According to Eclectic Method corporate lawyers were chasing him for his digital piracy a decade ago, but now these same companies chase him for his cut and paste talents.
“It used to be a punk aesthetic, but the laws changed because the internet changed them,” explains Eclectic Method, whose work landed him in the Copyright Criminals documentary. “This used to be super contentious 10 years ago when I started, but now the Weinstein company, Jay-Z and everyone else see it as good publicity.”
As Brian Eno said on first seeing Eclectic Method perform, “Something like this was bound to happen.”
Nowadays you’re more likely to find him dividing his time between Europe and USA, VJ-ing at big clubs and festivals and working with the likes of Fatboy Slim, Childish Gambino, Reggie Watts or Chuck D.
“One of first people I sent Meta Hip Hop to was Chuck D,” he told TLE Music, “as a tune I made with him, ‘Outta Sight’, is on it and he said ‘it’s incredible!’
“It took me about 15 years of collecting and three days of producing to knock this together.
“I have a huge collection of acappella hip hop videos that I have collected over the years to DJ with and suddenly thought it would be fun to make a new hip hop tune of all these old classics.
“I collected all these acappellas over the last 15 or so years and re-synced them with the videos so when I play live I can play any vocal over any track and create live audio-visual mash-ups .”
You can catch Eclectic Method this month at the Flatpack Film Festival in Birmingham, in residence at Palace Nightclub in Dublin or in a super club near you soon. For more audio-visual jaw-dropping mix-mastery, check out Eclectic Method’s site and download the track for free here.
In the meantime feast your ears on just about every great Hip Hop tune from the past four decades.
So tell us – how many tracks did you recognise?