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"Pop Smears are a plunderphonic genre created by Ms O'Kneel in 2014. The basic Pop Smear is created by speeding up a song - often to a quarter or sixteenth of its original length - and then stretching it back out again to its original length.

The results are startling: songs that are immediately recognisable, and yet estranged, as their notes and tones exist as before, but any sudden sounds - drums, stabs, vocal plosives, etc - are blurred into granular grindings, or wafty reverse-reverb cloudiness.

In this second volume of Pop Smears, familiar (and unexpectedly eclectic) songs are transformed into dense dreamscapes of surprise and memory, interrogating the boundaries between nostalgia and reality.

Yes, most of this was copied and pasted from the notes of the 2014 release. After all, if something's been said perfectly once, why write it all out again? Copy and paste, baby! Copy and paste!"

Department of Least Resistance (Redundancy Division)
IWML
November, 2019

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NOTES FROM B'O'K:

Note #1: There were two tools used to stretch these pieces back out to their original lengths: Paul's Stretch Tool and Adobe Audition. If the sound is smooth and washy, it's Paul's Stretch; if the sound is glitchy and granular, it's Audition. Several tracks have parts from both processes, especially the longer ones like Stairway and Bohemian. You'll hear the difference.

Note #2: This release also makes use of the "Tonal" slider setting on Paul's Stretch - I'm honestly not totally sure what it does, but it slides between "noise" and "tone", and in these tonal mixes, it's nearly all the way to the "tone" side. Whatever it's doing, it sounds good to me! I decided to include both mixes so you could hear the difference. Sick mate.


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THE 'ETERNITY' SERIES:

Superstition - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Superstition
Heaven - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Heaven
Immortal - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Immortal
Neverending - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Neverending
A Devil Put Aside For Me - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-DevilPutAsideForMe
Believe - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Believe
Paradise - archive.org/details/ButtressOkneel-Paradise
Xanadu - https://buttressokneel.bandcamp.com/album/xanadu

“Words like "mashup" and "remix" don't really do justice to Buttress O'Kneel's method - Top 40 pop crap gets sliced, diced, and tossed into a dizzying, exciting hardcore electro stew. Compared to other djs who timidly drop a Vanilla Ice acapella over a Chemical Bros intro just to move a dance floor, O'Kneel shreds copyrights with a blood-curdling vehemence. Smash the state!”
- Music 4 Maniacs

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