Benny Benassi vs. Dave Winer

If you stay current on my del.icio.us links (they're in the sidebar), you'll have seen the latest comedic turn in the weblogs.com debacle - waxy.org is hosting a remix contest of Dave's audio post.

Having been bitten by the remix bug a long time ago (and the recent acquisition of DJ Shadow's In Tune And On Time, which has live footage of Pushin' Buttons Live), I broke out Traktor DJ Studio and browsed my library for the appropriate song to mash Dave Winer into.

Lately I had been listening to the Benny Benassi album more and more; I had originally blocked it from my consciousness as I found the single "Satisfaction" to be irritating as hell. But as I ended up listening to other tracks - particularly "Time" and "Get Loose" - I noticed that there's some decent electro house underneath the silly vocal samples. I enjoyed the songs with the least robotic voicing the best.

So when my vision landed on "I'm Sorry", I realized a number of birds could be killed with one mashup stone. Not only was it a good song for layering samples over, and not only was there some significance to the existing vocal sample (a number of people are up in arms that Dave has not said he was sorry), but I could potentially remove the part of the vocal sample that irritated me (the full vocal sample is: "Are you sleeping? Ohhhh. I'm sorry.", and with the exception of the last two words, I never liked it.)

So between last night and this morning, I mashed and redubbed and banged my head into the desk repeatedly until I had a workable dance track. I worked together a few jokey sample combinations ("Formats and protocols...are a DEADLY combination." and a couple using the I'm Sorry sample), and I avoided using the "People love to jump up and down" sample, because this isn't really a jump-up-and-down track. Some trimming and minor tweaking in Cacophony, and an encoding in iTunes, and voila. Or maybe I should say bing!

You can grab it from waxy.org, or locally on vjarmy.com. I'm pretty happy with it, although it would probably be perfect if I had a proper sampling and arranging program like Peak.

Comments happily taken.