Israeli mashup artist Kutiman doesn’t create his songs out of music you’ve already heard of. Instead, he trolls the depths of YouTube to find footage of amateur musicians, practicing their scales and arpeggios, or improvising, or just goofing off. And then he blends them together into compositions that sound amazingly good. His songs are a celebration of how the internet can bring people together from all over the world to create wonderful things.
Watch a mash-up of 23 amateur musicians, combined into one kick-ass band
Emily St. James was a senior correspondent for Vox, covering American identities. Before she joined Vox in 2014, she was the first TV editor of the A.V. Club.
His first collection, Thru You, released in 2009 and received wide acclaim, and he’s finally prepping a follow-up, Thru You Too, coming October 1. “Give It Up,” the first single from Thru You Too, was released recently, and it’s a haunting tune of lost love and regret, based around two major samples — a woman’s improvised a cappella song and a 6-year-old girl’s ad-libbed melody on a piano. But it also features 21 other internet performers, mixed together in harmony. If you like those samples or any others in any of Kutiman’s songs, he provides information on where he found them in the “about” field of every video.
Listen to “Give It Up” now, and click on the links above to explore Kutiman’s work in depth.
