REMODELED X MINUS 1 ON A VERY LONG FUSE

"Oh Christ, what the hell happened? We had Remodeled Music, then we had Remodeled X, bubbly and fun, nice and contiguous, but, to some ears, a little thin, missing some of the depth of sampling that Paul Ryan, of The Button in the sense that Albert Sweitzer was a part of the Kennedy Administration, is known for. Remodeled X was, quite surprisingly, created from only 22 commercials. There were rumors, of course, of a follow up album, but that was in 2002, shortly after Remodeled X came out.

Then I fell off the face of the earth.

Like whatshisface from Tron, I got lost inside a computer. Me, along with 113 commercials, that's what it ultimately took. I thought I could get away with only 87, but it just wasn't going to make it as it was. The album after Remodeled X needed more depth, more to listen to. Listening to it over and over and over again, move a piece here, move a piece there, and try to get them to sound like something, something like music. I have been told (by the people who don't absolutely hate it) that it's fun, but they didn't have to do the recording of hours upon hours of television, editing down mind-numbingly large numbers of samples, (of those previously mentioned 113 commercials, promos, and bumper music bits recorded over a roughly 3 year period, each one of them in turn has been broken down into on average slightly less than eight samples per commercial, about 894 samples, give or take prescription drug or two. I'm not going to list them all.) then concocting ways of sequencing them together so that the diverse elements play off each other in a musical way, and not sound like thousands of shopping carts full of silverware falling off a cliff or a manatee farting underwater.

This is not to say that the whole Remodeled Music concept isn't compelling, it is. It's the most blatant form of mashup (that word hadn't been invented yet when I started doing this) a kind of audio graffiti, huge bright blobs of competing symbol and meaning, music whit lyrics, but in this case the lyrics are trying to sell you something, if they can get a whole sentence out at once, and aren't drowned out by a competing message from a competing announcer.

Well, I finally emerged from the computer, with this bright new album Remodeled X minus 1, in my arms. Yes, you may have one. Careful, it's still a little sticky." - Paul Ryan