Posted on: March 26, 2011 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

With a rambunctious, unruly spirit and a supercomputer’s worth of samples and productions, UK via Brooklyn producers/ DJs Eclectic Method remain fixed at the forefront of the rapidly-emerging audiovisual remix culture.

Now with their debut music single “Outta Sight,” their latest collaboration with Public Enemy’s Chuck D, the postmodern group – which includes founding members Ian Edgar, Jonny Wilson and Geoff Gamlen – get to fully showcase their own electro and hip hop inspired production. In true EM form, keeping one eye on the past and the other aimed squarely at the future, it only made sense for the trio to collaborate with one of music’s legends Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

With an experimental yet playful, punk attitude, the group has been pioneering audio and video remix creations and the very notion of how to rock a crowd for nearly a decade. The group’s bona fides speaks for itself: Every figurehead of every genre, from U2, Phish, Fatboy Slim and the Bob Marley Family to every cutting edge lifestyle brand including MTV and Twitter plus major global events for the likes of Twitter, Activision, Mashable have requested their talented skills in some shape or form.

In 2009, on behalf of the aptly titled film “Copyright Criminals,” the group performed a set with Chuck D and legendary James Brown drummer Clyde Stubblefield at the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a perfect marriage: Stubblefield, whose work on “Funky Drummer,” “Cold Sweat” and countless others have made him one of the most sampled musicians in history; Chuck D, whose albums pioneered the use of samples in hip-hop and whose vocal lines have been endlessly recycled by others; and Eclectic Method, the glorious bastard children of an era where the parameters of sampling and recontextualization are boundless. It is this very lineage that Chuck D refers to when dropping the lines “it’s not audio-visual, we living in the visual-audio age” and “outta sight, outta mind, we don’t matter, we don’t mind.” Now coming full circle, on March 29 – Eclectic Method will be performing with Chuck D live on National TV. Stay tuned as we announce more information soon.

The group has their fair share of viral success — they’ve remixed everything from John Hughes and Quentin Tarantino (“The Tarantino Mixtape,” remixing and mashing together all of the director’s films, was a viral hit and received the Vimeo Festival Community Choice Award and over 500,000 hits on Vimeo) to Wu-Tang Clan and “The Colbert Report” (earning a nod of approval and on-air playback from Stephen Colbert himself). On videos like “Robots,” which feature R2D2, Johnny Five and others talking over an electro-house beat, the group is Coldcut on steroids; the musical and visual manifestation of today’s free-for-all, cut-and-paste media landscape.“We’re admittedly a weird hybrid of band, production company, editors, directors, music composers and DJs/remixers,” says Ian.

Their live shows began generating rapid word of mouth in 2003 for the trio’s spontaneous, improvised video manipulation. “It’s mostly about people enjoying themselves,” says Wilson. “We’re not trying to make some impressive, postmodern intellectual commentary”. It’s a skill that has brought them to more than 35 countries across six continents. Adds Wired magazine: “Eclectic Method’s kinetic live shows splice music, film, TV and video games into a body-rocking audiovisual concoction that gets clubbers hopping and synapses popping.”

Ask them their plans for the next year or so — with all the productions, original compositions, videos and collaborations behind them — and all three members will instantly spout a list of ideas still to be explored due to time constraints or the non-existence of the necessary technology. “There are things we see in our heads that aren’t technologically possible yet,” says Edgar. “We want to know where the edge is of what other people are doing right now and transcend that. No matter what we’re doing, it’s always about, how far can we take it? There’s still a lot more to explore.”

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