It is with a sad and heavy heart that I must report the demise of boomselection. Its passing was announced today on the website of the same name.
It started back in November of 2001. At that time, I first heard of mash-ups, the practice of taking the vocals of one song and putting them on top of the instrumental of another entirely different (hopefully, wildly divergent) song. Dan Sheldon (a.k.a. the_dr) was pushing the efforts of freelance hellrasier, osymyso, soulwax, frenchbloke & son, and a host of others.
He promoted the sale of a CD of mash-ups; I sent in my money. Months passed. Was it a year? Anyway, it wasn’t entirely clear I was ever going to receive anything for my money. He was just some guy in Britain. Then, an e-mail came, promising the work. And one day, out of the blue, came the package. Three disks, with over 42 hours of MP3s: long mixes, mash-ups, source material. Amazing.
It’s been about four years, and while mash-ups don’t have the glamour they once did, one will catch the public’s fancy now and again. Lots of the mixers have essentially turned pro, such as Mark Vidler (a.k.a. Go Home Productions). I still feel that a well-done mash-up is a wonderful thing, demonstrating concretely how mutable pop music is. The Freelance Hellraiser (Roy Kerr) took The Strokes’ “Hard To Explain” and Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in A Bottle” and created something greater than the sum of its parts: A Stroke of Genius.
The boomselection site had been quiet over the entire summer, so it wasn’t a big surprise. But it is a loss.
2 Responses
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jason Says:
oooh that boomselection 3 disc compendium — any way to still get my hands on that? bit torrent or something?
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The Pop View Says:
We are but simple country folk here. We know naught of these torrential outpourings of bits. But if someone wanted to set such a thing up, we would be happy to provide copies of the disks.
Quite frankly, we would add a fourth disk, because the original series pre-dated Go Home Productions, who has done a bunch of awesome work in the meantime.