Remixing My Favorite Remixer
Glitch art shows the essence of how fragile and precise code must be for an image to be perfect. Every image we see, audio recording we hear, and video we watch, is all just a very specific set of code. It comments on how easily something can be destroyed or ruined — Mallika Roy from the website “the periphery” talks more in depth about the meaning of glitch art and provides some examples in her article titled “Glitch it Good: Understanding the Glitch Art Movement.”
Glitched images to me appear to be like remixed images. They contain a lot of the same components and you can tell what the original idea is, but it is distinctively different. I decided to create a piece that remixes a music remixer. I don’t listen to a lot of Electronic Dance Music, but the one artist I follow is Madeon. He takes songs and beats from some of my favorite musicians, like Passion Pit, Mark Foster from Foster the People, and Dan Smith from Bastille, and remixes their voices to become a part of the beat. He creates a perfect balance of vocals and mixed music.
In my glitch art representing Madeon, I wanted him to become a part of my remix. Being a DJ, he doesn’t get much attention since his vocals are not the focus of the song. I actually had not seen what he looked like before doing this project because DJs are so “behind the scenes.”
First off, I used a picture of him during a live set. I played around with glitching the code and I finally — because every good glitch artist knows that knowing when to stop is the most important part — stopped with this glitch:
This is perfect and representative on so many levels. It still shows what he looks like — for the most part — which was one of my goals. It is blue and green which he frequently uses in his albums’ covers. Also his music is a little calmer than most electronic dance music, and these colors reflect that. The picture seems to be broken up into different levels, and the levels are relatively even. It looks like a visual beat in my opinion.
Madeon remixes vocals as a beat a lot — especially in Nonsense featuring Mark Foster. Foster’s remixed vocals are the only thing playing during the bridge of the song. I can only describe it as musical Morse code — it is a sharp blip of his remixed vocals. The sliced layers of the picture create a stair looking image. This represents the repeating beats of the vocals (in that song specifically, but it applies to many others as well). The different levels could also represent the different layers of vocals, beats, mixes, content, etc. that he uses in his music. The random distorted pixel squares remind me of his song Pixel Empire. They are sprinkled through the entire image.
This glitch art is representative of Madeon’s music and style. He remixes music to create something new from old and original sounds, and I remixed him to create a new representation of him and symbolically his career.
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