Pogo: Source-driven Pop-Hypnotica

By Dan Freeman

I’ve always been a fan of remix culture – anything from hip-hop sampling to officially-sanctioned club remixes and extended mixes of popular radio tunes to, most recently, mashups – as it displays a creativity and understanding of art that often surpasses the original work or works. If you think about it, just about all creative output is based on or derived from the work of others, which could lead to an extended discussion about the philosophy of copyright, which I will not have at this time. Most novelists and filmmakers could tell you that Shakespeare and the great Greek writers pretty much told every type of story there is to tell – all we do is repackage the themes with whatever gimmick makes it current.

Enter Pogo, who, according to a brief bio on LastFM:

is an emerging electronic music artist in Perth, Western Australia. He is known for his work recording small sounds from a single film or scene and sequencing them to form a new piece of music.

Essentially, a remix artist – taking sounds from films, completely divorcing them from context and removing any link to their original meaning, recombining them, and then often pairing them with a music video constructed from the original source material (but similarly divorced from context). The results, clearly painstaking, are marvelous. Here are a few examples:

Terminator 2

Up!

Harry Potter

and the superb Alice in Wonderland

This is definitely an artist to watch. Main website here.