Released: January 1st, 2024
Genre: plunderphonics, sound collage
William Maranci started making mashups on his YouTube channel, inspired by Neil Cicierega, whose series of unhinged comedy mashup albums set the standard for all mashups since. Maranci followed this tradition, making catchy fusions of different songs well-known in the pop music sphere. The combination of artists was always part of the comedy—whether it was Taylor Swift with Deftones, the Killers with T-Pain, Madonna with Meshuggah. It rests on the basis of “this shouldn’t work, but it does.”
Recently Maranci decided to take a step further. The last two projects he made, Meat Mountain and The Flamingo Cafe, forayed into full on sample-mania. Instead of mashing up just two or three songs together, each song is full-on collage, incorporating often fifteen or more songs, picking apart their individual pieces to make something completely new. And not just songs—commercial jingles, clips from TV and movies, memes, YouTube videos. He often manipulates vocal melodies and lyrics to fit other song elements, such as when he turns Kendrick Lamar’s verses on his song “Humble” into complete nonsense on “Yumble.” It’s very effective for subverting expectations, for humor, and for anyone who’s ever wanted to hear Kendrick Lamar proclaim “I’m the sandwich man.”
But the purpose of those albums, first and foremost, was comedy. Many of the songs are listenable and quite catchy, but there’s always a joke at the base of it, whether it was a variety of artists saying the word “time” on “Times,” or “Float On” by Modest Mouse and “I Don’t Care” by Icona Pop being undercut by car crash sound effects on “Uh-Oh.” This new album, Something Was Beautiful, forgoes the attempts at comedy and just goes for a sincere plunderphonic experience, which he self-deprecatingly describes as “uncanny valley hipster nonsense.”
Like The Flamingo Cafe, Something Was Beautiful pulls from a wide array of sources, from the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs, to Elliot Smith, to Mariah Carey, to A Tribe Called Quest—and various non-musical sources, such as recordings of President George W. Bush, clips from the Comedy Central show Nathan For You, and asdfmovie4.
Looking at the list of samples for each track (supplied under “track info” on Bandcamp) you can see that most of the songs still revolve around a theme—one of these themes, most interestingly, is the September 11th terrorist attacks. A distorted version of the Twin Towers appears on the cover, and samples related to it appear across the album, such as Mr. Rogers discussing it on TV, NPR’s coverage of the tragedy’s tenth anniversary, and reports of pleasant weather from September 10th. I don’t know what the reason behind this is, or if Maranci has any real-life connection to the tragedy, but it contributes to the overall feeling of melancholy on the album, that something terrible has happened that has changed everything irreversibly. Something was beautiful.
There is still comedy: such as multiple songs titled some variation of “Radioactive” being sampled on “Radioactivity” (and the dark irony of “Threnody For The Victims of Hiroshima” also being there), the appearance of the “Gibgogabgallab” song, a pitched down Flo Rida rapping over dissonant royalty free harmonies on “New Years Eve 2019,” the uncanny distorted Peter Griffin on the cover— the humor is still there. But I find that the moments of total earnesty on the album are the most impactful, like “Don’t Be Sad, Be Happy For Me,” in Broadcast’s “Tears In The Typing Pool” is layered over the sighing vocals from Sufjan Stevens’ “John My Beloved.” It’s a beautiful and eerie combination. The pitched vocal samples and repeated audio of Wesley Willis saying “Jesus is the answer” makes “Holy Land Experience, Orlando, FL” an odd ode to religion. “The Fireworks We Deserved” brings the album to a fitting end—samples overwhelming each other into cacophonous noise until they all cut out and you’re left with a single, melancholic note.
Moments of beauty are juxtaposed against the harshness of reality—dissonant washes of noise (courtesy of Merzbow) and the startling heavy metal breakdown on “Frango.” It feels like a combination of the two most famous plunderphonic albums: the joyous vibes of Since I Left You and the eerie, liminal discontent of Everywhere At The End Of Time. Maybe that comparison is a bit too on-the-nose, but both of those albums could likely be considered by any other listener to be just uncanny valley hipster bullshit. Something Was Beautiful takes a step away from the “mashup album” as a novelty and into a conceptual project that’s sweet-sounding, melancholic, and fun to listen to.
Junior Berkeley Frost is a Staff Writer. Their email is bfrost@fandm.edu.