Some mixes and mashups from a galaxy far, far away...
Ours is a Star Wars household. We just finished watching all the movies with the boy, made a second pass through the excellent Mandalorian series and the boy and I are making our way through the Clone Wars. We're prepping to paint up our own droid army and, well it has me thinking to Star Wars music.
No, I'm not talking about the iconic John Williams scores -- though his work is reflected in these selections. Instead, I want to highlight some other examples of Star Wars-related and Star Wars-inspired music.
Various - Starwars Headspace
Produced by Rick Rubin and Kevin Kusatsu, this 2016 compilation delivers 15 Star Wars-flavored tracks. My personal Star Wars fandom was in remission at the time (my son wasn't old enough to really get into it yet), but I've sense come back to it and the record has some really stellar (ha!) tracks on it.
To be clear, it's a killer comp and you should give it a listen in full, but Röyksopp's "Bounty Hunters" is one of my favorites. It features a darker, more driven sound than I was honestly expecting from the Norwegian duo and features some starship sounds and a repeated sample from Gredo in the Huttese language:
Ghomrassen by Bonobo is also great, along with stand-out tracks by Flying Lotus and Good Times Ahead. You can stream the album on Spotify or wherever you get your music.
DJ Food - The Tracks Go Off In This Direction
The legendary DJ Food has a long track record of sleek mixes and unabashed sci-fi nerdom -- and in 2015 he put out an incredible AV mix titled "The Tracks Go Off in This Direction." In Food's own words, "it follows the hunt for the Droids as songs and styles from the SW canon get progressively more random. It’s all Star Wars, plenty of which you will have seen and heard before, but I like to think I’ve dug a little and unearthed some hidden gems that might not be as familiar as Meco‘s ubiquitous disco-fied Star Wars Theme."
I'm embedding the audio below, but you'll find the video version on DJ Food's own post. Do check out his website if you haven't, because it's a wonderful blog full of music, mixes, design and sci-fi love. I interviewed Food several years back. I need to see about resurrecting that here.
Supergenius - Star Wars Breakbeats
This next one is actually an older release that I learned of through that interview with DJ Food I just mentioned. The original interview has been consumed by the World Wide Sarlacc, but here's what Food had to say about it the 1998 release:
"I've got another CD here and it's not really strictly a mix. It's Star Wars Breakbeats. It's an album by this guy from New York called Suckadelic who basically now makes toys which are bootlegs of Star Wars figures, but they're kind of jazzed and pimped up versions of Boba Fett in fluorescent pink and he makes them in limited runs of 25 and such. How he's never been pulled up by George Lucas I'll never know. He made this album back in the '90s and it's just kind of very basic trip-hoppy breakbeat songs, but completely peppered with Star Wars samples all the way through. He released it as a very limited edition CD, which a friend of mine managed to get for me from New York when she was living over there. It's quite a curio now, but I'm sure you can find it online somewhere. I mean, it's not even that brilliant, but it's just one of the first things that came out that dared to sample Star Wars heavily, more than just the off snatch. It was so blatant -- there was no way it could ever get released commercially. Star Wars is a massive influence, but I try to steer away from it in my own work because it's so overdone, so overplayed in terms of sampling. But I'm sure there's some good Star Wars-related mixes out there."
Suckadelic currently hosts the entire album on Soundcloud:
Party Ben - Galvanize the Empire
I first heard this track in DJ Irk's excellent Irked Vol. 4 mix. Titled Galvanize the Empire, it's the work of San Francisco's Party Ben, who mashed up the Chemical Brothers and Q-Tip's Galvanize with Williams' Imperial March to excellent effect. Wonderful synergy here. Irk drops it in nicely in the mix linked above, but you can enjoy it on its own right here:
Of course, Star Wars is a huge part of our culture, so its roots are everywhere. I love being able to, say, do a Spotify search on "Droideka" and run across some bass music -- bass music which, I can only assume, was perpetrated by a Colicoids destroyer droid. There are tons of other remixes, mashups and Star Wars-themed tracks. These are just a few favorites of mine.
Let's close out with another creation of Suckadelic -- his 1998 Breakdancing Stormtrooper super8 stop motion adventure:
By all means, though, share your own Star Wars favorites with me.
Comments