World Music

ThruYOU is an album of seven original songs, each built from dozens of fragments of video clips of (mostly amateur) musicians, selected from among the seemingly endless footage of music lessons and private recitals archived on YouTube. (You can watch and listen on Thru-You.com, Kutiman’s cleverly custom-designed site.) Over what must have been a grueling two months, Kutiman collected an array of striking sounds and images, some no longer than a split second, and pressed them into musical service. Each one now furnishes a note or two, or a groove or a sensibility, in Kutiman’s audiovisual medleys. He has put the fractured universe of musical YouTube in concert. The housebound noodlers of the world now miraculously jam together.

Music bloggers have praised Kutiman for effectively using YouTube as a musical instrument and striking a blow for freedom from corporatized pop music. The project, wrote Jon Newton on P2PNet, is “absolutely, 100 percent guaranteed to inspire artists around the world to produce art which has never been seen before and never could have been seen without the Internet.” Lawrence Lessig, the legal scholar and anti-copyright crusader, cited ThruYOU, which samples wantonly from the publicly available music on the Web, as a vivid lesson in why copyright law cannot hold on the Internet.

But whatever its standing as ideological object, ThruYOU is also just stunning. Using and refining the technique of “video scratching,” ThruYOU builds fully orchestrated songs from Kutiman’s selected digital excerpts. Most of the clips show musicians in modest domestic spaces, improvised studios, barely finished basements and bunkerlike bedrooms. The videos almost always feature one musician in a soliloquy tableau that’s by now familiar to YouTubers: somewhat sheepishly, a soloist plays into a self-monitored camera and cheap microphone.

Often the videos that Kutiman samples are how-tos and demos, in which a musician flaunt-teaches his skills, as in the first track on ThruYOU: “The Mother of All Funk Chords.” Kutiman introduces that piece, a groovy fantasia, by staging a conversation among various disparate videos. In the first, a drummer in a feather-trimmed fedora (Bernard Purdie, who like all the musicians is identified in the credits) asks an unseen audience, “Well, what can I do?” He indolently taps out a 16th-note shuffle.

The answer to his question comes instantly from another Kutiman-cut video, one featuring a younger guitarist in a backward cap. As if in reply, the cap guy says, “Play that 16th-note groove —”

“ . . . Just straight,” finishes another guitarist, from another video, before the cap guy resurfaces, hitting an E9 chord. Magic. The rhythm is in place, and the piece that began in the stumped loneliness of “What can I do?” is off and running. The demos, a staple form of YouTube, now collectively suggest a classic boast of funk: Here’s how it’s done.

But that’s just the beginning. The rhythm section is rapidly joined by video clips of other instruments in other rooms: a sax, a tuba, trumpets, many guitars, a theremin. One trumpeter is a child. As the music swells, Kutiman exploits the visual tempo of the videos — intermittently setting them up in grid form, so they’re all in one frame — to punctuate the sound. The original cap guy, for example, has a half-smiling, askance “did you hear that?” expression that Kutiman repeatedly deploys to underscore brief rests.

A charmless white room then fills the screen for a bunch of beats. Its few appointments include a school desk, a nondescript computer, a plastic laundry basket and a halogen torchière lamp of the kind common to dorm rooms and starter apartments in the 1990s. Then a middle-aged man enters with a harmonica. The introversion of the living space is suddenly undone as the room becomes a stage set for purposes of the video, with the musician singing in an ersatz Joe Cocker mode. The aging musician, whose forced concept of rock and roll appears to have been nourished in this sad room, has been turned by Kutiman into a rocker king.

The Kutiman track “I M New” has a sequence starring a guy in a hoodie with a logo that reads “Cincinnati”; he’s rapping on a curbside about a career crisis. “Babylon Band” shows an organist seeming to correct herself while practicing at what looks like a small church. You would expect the emphasis on awkward amateurs to turn the project parodic, except that Kutiman finds in every performance brilliantly human turns of phrase or physicality. Virtuosos with smug expressions do win the riffs sometimes, but the whole belongs to all the participants — and Kutiman, with a maestro’s sense of orchestration, lets the sad-sack types periodically upstage the showoffs.

Not long ago, Kutiman told Wired about how ThruYOU came about. “I downloaded a clip from a drummer, who I now realize is Bernard Purdie, who has sessioned on all kinds of records,” he said. “All it needed was some bass and guitar; I loved the idea that I was playing along with him and he didn’t even know it. But once I decided to download another clip and play over it, I thought, Why not get another video to play over it? Since then, I haven’t really slept or eaten. I lost track of night and day. I’d just pass out and wake up on the computer.”

Some of that creative fever dream comes through on the album, and especially in “About,” the quick video at the end that features Kutiman, looking exhausted and sly. “I had a great time searching for you and working with you,” he says to the camera.

I had a great time searching for you. Kutiman’s voice on this line is surpassingly romantic. It’s also modern. What ThruYOU expresses best is the love of the mixer for the mixed.