Michal Luria – Looking Outwards – 11

Thru-You / Kutiman

The project I will discuss this week is “Thru-You”, by Israeli musician Kutiman. The project is a song and video clip created by the artist by sampling many unrelated videos that were uploaded to YouTube:

The clip created in the project “Thru-you”, that was created by Kutiman, who samples various clips and created a new musical piece. Source.

Kutiman sampled various clips uploaded to YouTube of artists, musicians and teachers playing different instruments and different melodies.

What I liked most about this project is that instead of creating a musical piece and deciding the role of each instrument in the composition, Kutiman was limited to the clips he found on YouTube and wanted to use, but was also inspired by them.

Kutiman used computational tool to synchronize and match various parts of different songs to work together according to a specific beat, as well as to resample a specific part of a clip to create the wanted result. Although some of the process was manually edited by Kutiman, a lot of his work is based on computing music samples, and ultimately these tools, as well as the existence of the internet, allowed him to create a unique song that is a mashup of videos of random people who posted their videos online.