Pogo is the alias of a 21 year old electronic music artist from Perth, Australia who composes tracks using sampled sounds and music from childrens films. I'm firmly of the mind that stuff like this should be on view at the Museum of Modern Art in this day and age; YouTube has blown open the walls that we have always used to define video art and experimental film, forcing us to consider anything and everything uploaded by any user as a piece of recorded art. People like Pogo are proving that postmodern art is alive and well, full of audiovisual possibilities and creative potential. Pogo adds his own beats and basslines here and there, but the videos of his I like best rely on the samples for the hooks and movements, like "Alice." I love how his sound editing results in nonsensical verbal hooks as in "Alice;" our minds try to make sense of these non-words and form our own gestalt sentences out of them. (here: "there is still always...")
Speaking of vocal hooks, Pogo's best might be in this Mary Poppins-based track "Expialidocious." Here you see that Pogo's videos have their own visual appeal as he intercuts film scenes along with the sampled music. The dancing cartoon penguins and the hotness of Julie Andrews don't hurt either.
A track based on "Candy Man" from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Here you go.
If you know me, you know that a 100% ambient track based on sounds from The Secret Garden is gonna be one of my favorites:
I'm not crazy about the drum-and-bass action going on in this one, but any Harry Potter fan needs to see this, and I love the Richard Harris Dumbledore bridge of "Four hundred and seventy two second place / 'nother year / second" and the section that follows. Also a nice incorporation of the original film score.
When Pixar was preparing to release UP, Pogo became the latest in a long history of independent artists adopted by industry; Pixar commissioned Pogo to create an official promotional video for UP, and the result, "Upular" is below. Love the use of Michael Giacchino's score and the amped-up vocal editing. Great stuff.
And celebrating tonight's release of Toy Story 3, Pixar returned to Pogo for a new remix featuring Woody, Buzz and the rest of the Toy Story gang. Pogo's latest:
Follow the YouTube yellow brick road to learn more about Pogo, and stay tuned more many more internet postmodernists who I'd like to see in a gallery at MoMA.
