Audio Arsenal

DJ Food, Raiding The 20th Century

• April 19th, 2005

Gotta love DJ Food and their constant itch to remix, recut, mashup, tweak, fondle, fiddle, and finesse the existing audio of the world!

“On January 18th 2004, Strictly Kev premiered the original ‘Raiding The 20th Century’ on XFM’s ‘The Remix’ show in London. It was a 40 minute attempt to catalogue the history of cut up music - be it avant garde tape manipulation, turntable megamixes or bastard pop mash ups. It rapidly spread throughout the web and managed to cause a full scale server crash on boomselection.info when they hosted it due to the volume of net traffic.

Shortly afterwards he read Paul Morley’s recently published book ‘Words & Music’ and was amazed that certain chapters mirrored parts of his mix. Apart from the fact that the title, ‘Raiding the 20th Century’ was coined by Morley 20 years before for a future Art of Noise project, he also featured Alvin Lucier who - purely by chance - was sampled on the opening track of the mix.

Kev decided to expand his idea to make the defnitive document on cut up music including many other parts, omitted by the constraints of the original radio session. After months of further research he tracked Morley down and they recorded passages from ‘Words & Music’ specially for this mix in an attempt to marry the two and finish something that neither of them actually started. A year to the day of the original airing, the newly expanded version is ready.”

‘Raiding the 20th Century’ - MP3 File (Original Download Link)
‘Raiding the 20th Century’ - Bit Torrent (Deluxe Edition, encoded at 320kbps)

via DJ Food

Mark Vidler, GoHome Productions UK

• April 15th, 2005