REMIX HISTORY

clipped from ethnomus.ucr.edu The concept of ‘remixing’ in music has become increasingly widespread in the 1990s, with remixes becoming more and more prominent in pop, R&B, hiphop, techno, and other dance genres. However, the idea of creating musical ‘remixes’ appears to originate in popular music much earlier than this, in the work of Jamaican dub producers working in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pioneering producers such as Lee Perry, King Tubby, and Scientist made an art form out of taking prerecorded rhythm tracks and rearranging them into a piece of music, a new version as they called it. The importance of this cannot be overstated: in an era of information overload, the art of remixing and sampling as practiced by hiphop DJs and producers points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts.