Kutiman
ThruYou

It is difficult to talk about "album". This is one of those works that positions itself in those territories of intersection between various arts. One of those creations that spans music, video editing, video installations, digital art, and who knows how much more...

Kutiman, a dj producer from Tel Aviv, is an anonymous name for most... one of those artists who does decent stuff but not enough to be heard by more than a small niche of listeners; but one day he wakes up with the right idea in mind... the idea that suddenly circulates his name around the web making him a global phenomenon.

The stroke of genius in question is "ThruYou" (through you), a title that evokes the name of the most widespread multimedia network on the web (YouTube obviously) and wants to specify that everything was done "through you", where the subject Kutiman refers to is an immense number of subjects who, like faces in Warholian prints, populate the screen of YouTube depersonalizing themselves to become digital images on the net. They are the material, the music, the images from which the seven tracks of ThurYou are made.

"What you see is what you hear," Kutiman tells us on the initial page of the site where the project can be viewed: http://thru-you.com/ (of course it is also entirely available on YouTube). What you see are unlikely guys explaining how to play instruments, Chinese people playing trumpets, homemade blues-men, losers recording themselves playing the most unlikely instruments, pieces of music history, commercial demonstrations of instruments and so on. A mix that reveals the immense work of viewing, selection and mixing that this project had to entail. The result is astonishing, it's not just the idea, it's not just on a conceptual level that the work is appreciated, but also musically speaking the result is impeccable.

The first track (The Mother Of All Funk Chords) is an irresistible funk-blues where the voice consists of a man indulging in a voice-harmonica blues in an anonymous room from who knows what part of the world, while a beautifully constructed rhythmic base unfolds beneath and a guitarist in a t-shirt with a foolish face lets loose. This Is What It Become, the second track, is a kind of very nice electro-reggae... I'm New is a captivating ballad where the voice of a beautiful girl cradles you and leads you to Babylon Band, an amazing piece, where a kid on the drums and one on the mandolin become the samples around which an electronic piece that makes your head spin is built...

When you finish listening/watching the seven tracks of "Thru You" it will seem like you have witnessed a strange concert held in a non-place composed of small suburban stages, rooms of houses in who knows what part of the world, streets of who knows what city, music stores located who knows where... Kutiman brings common people to become music; he turns the average joe who records himself in his room, wanting to share with the world his progress in learning an instrument, and the professional, who shows how to play the same instrument, into part of the same thing. In some ways what Kutiman did is a small miracle, listening to his tracks you almost get the impression that there is a sort of collective mind, which is something more than just the sum of the individuals composing it, a networked orchestra spread around the world that without knowing it composed an organic piece. The elements of this orchestra have no name, or rather, have the name that the web imposes on them, their identity when they enter the net as a data flow (Gibson predicted it all)... just click on Credits while watching one of the ThruYou videos to know, for example, that the violinist of Just A Lady (the last track) is EJIu7k-MhVI (the code given by YouTube to the video uploaded by the guy to the web and that Kutiman used for his work)... and you can see the original version.