This page collects a variety of audio & visual works produced by Wayne Marshall, aka wayneandwax, including mashups, DJ-style mixes, and soundscapes —
“Zunguzung Mega Mix” (April 2013) [mix]
50+ echoes of Yellowman’s “Zunguzung” tune, from reggae to hip-hop, rave to reggaeton, rock to pop. For more info, see here.
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“Boston Pirate Party” (Summer 2011) [soundscape / radio collage]
An audio collage comprising 125 excerpts from a total of 1.3 hours of ambient recordings of Boston-area radio transmissions made on August 24th and 29th while sitting in my car, parked at home in Cambridge. See here for more details & framing.
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“Gasodoble” (January 2011) [mashup / video montage]
This video stitches together 13 performances of “España Cañi” collected on YouTube. It sets them all to the tempo and (more or less) the key of the instrumental, or pista, from Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” produced by Luny Tunes. (See here for more info.)
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“Galangs” (August 2010) [mashup]
galangs from wayneandwax on Vimeo.
Ableton Live footage of a mashup of two versions of “Galang” — the MIA original + the Vijay Iyer Trio version. For more information, please see here; for some critical reception, see here, here, and here.
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“The Lion Seeps Tonight” (April 2006) [mashup]
This mashup attempts to embody and refigure the tortuous story of Solomon Linda’s “Mbube,” the song that provided the inspiration for the Weavers’ 1951 adaptation, “Wimoweh,” and the Tokens’ 1961 smash hit, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” I also incorporate Yma Sumac’s 1952 cover to add another layer of messiness and dissonance. Throughout the track, I maintain the integrity of the Linda original, warping the others to its tempo, key, and length in a gesture toward some poetic justice. See here for details.
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“Big Gyptian” (September 2005) [mashup]
This remix brings together Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” and the composition undergirding its central sample, “Khosara,” as sung by Abdel-Halim Hafez. Again, in an attempt at some poetic justice, I have generally warped the Jay-Z around the earlier recording. See here for more details on the procedure and poetics at work; and please go here for a follow-up piece that merges the Jay-Z instrumental, produced by Timbaland, with the actual performance of “Khusara” it samples.
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“Another Crunk Genealogy” (December 2006) [DJ mix]
This mix, prepared for the Blogariddims podcast series, traces out a “crunk genealogy” of sorts, seeking common grooves and feedback loops between crunk and clave, reggaeton and ragtime, bhangra and bounce, to name a few. It stands as a demonstration of the shared rhythmic heritage of the Caribbean, as well as how such culturally-charged forms resonate with musical-cultural formations elsewhere — from the American South to South America, South Asia to Northern Europe, West Africa to the Middle East. More details, and some lessons in rhythm, here.
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“Boston Mashacre” (July 2005) [DJ mix / soundscape]
For Somerville’s ArtBeat 2005, where I gave a lecture/demo about mashups, I composed a pop-infused soundscape of Somerville — and Boston more broadly — bringing together a variety of iconic songs and sounds that, despite sharing geographical origins, do not always overlap so directly in cultural or social contexts. For further reflection on the poetics at work, see here, and for a follow-up project that plumbs some of Boston’s more marginal musical scenes while seeking to explode any notion of a coherent Boston sound, see the “Boston Smashacre.”
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“JA Radio Edit” (February 2003) [soundscape / radio collage]
This edit is drawn from an 11 minute recording of Jamaican radio signals I made on Sunday, the 9th of February, 2003. I wanted to represent the wide range of music one encounters on the Jamaican airwaves, especially the strikingly mellow — though sometimes manic — mood of Sunday mornings, full of American post-war pop and soul ballads. I love the odd juxtapositions and thematic links that emerge, some of which were quite incidental but proved musically affective, such as the suggestive soul stirrings of “have a little faith, just a little faith” as sandwiched between low-fi Jamaican church sermons. The opening whirring bears witness to the technology used to make the recording, the Sony Mini-Disc pictured above.
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“Dog Gone Diwali” (May 2003) [soundscape / musique concrète]
The Diwali was the biggest reggae riddim of 2003. It propelled three songs up the US pop charts — Sean Paul’s “Get Busy,” Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go,” and Lumidee’s “Never Leave You (Uh-oh)” — and ruled Jamaica’s dances and airwaves. As ubiquitous as the Diwali was, however, at night it vied with another prominent fixture of Kingston’s soundscape: stray dogs. Long wanting a way to represent the salience of these plaintive and rough sounds, I reprogrammed Lenky’s riddim using samples of dogs barking and whining in earshot of my apartment on Hope Road.
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“Puppet Macbeth” (December 2002) [score for live theater / musique concrète]
Puppet Macbeth was staged in the Kronauer Space at Harvard University in December 2002. I produced a score and sound effects for the production and triggered them live via laptop during performances. I tried to meet the directors’ vision for Macbeth’s Scotland, which tended toward the spooky, ethereal, and the carnivalesque. And I embraced the opportunity to make some musique concrète, sampling a refrigerator to evoke the phenomenological shifts when Macbeth starts seeing ghosts, cartoonishly amplifying a knock on a table to simulate the pounding on the castle door, and reproducing, a little more rhythmically, the din of a dinner. See here for other samples. (Above: “Lady’s Lament”)
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“Nico Concreto” (April 2008) [musique concrète / photo montage]
This video combines 680 photos and over 100 discrete samples recorded during my newborn’s first three months in the world. Recorded on an Edirol R-09 and assembled using Ableton Live. Premiered at Brandeis University’s Slosberg Recital Hall on 11 April 2008.