Lemons by Buttress O'Kneel

"WHEN BEYONCE GIVES YOU LEMONADE,
YOU GOTTA MAKE LEMONS."

all tracks improvised from two Beyonce songs, 'Formation' and 'Sorry', two singles from her 'Lemonade' album. first i cut some samples from those songs and played with them in various glitchy Audiomulch formations (with an amen-break or two chucked in, at various levels of filthy distortion). then i made a Popsmear mix of one of the songs, and also stretched the intro to one of the songs in Paulstretch (to ridiculous lengths - the 50ish second intro is now 16 minutes long). then i used that whole folder, including all the samples, the original songs, and all these new Audiomulch and Paulstretch jams, as source material for an improvised Forester session, which i then cut into smaller portions. this release is an EP, really, just a really long EP.

there's a kinda funny story behind this release, actually:

when Beyonce dropped 'Lemonade', for some dumb reason the phrase "when Beyonce gives you Lemonade, you've gotta make Lemons" popped into my head, and it was clear what i had to do: i had to take Lemonade and make a heap of songs called Lemons from it. ohoho, so hilarious. anyway, so i did that: found the song 'Lemonade' on the Youtubes and downloaded it, and made a good 48 minutes of epic awesomeness from it, all improvised in audiomulch and forester and paul's stretch and so on. and it was GREAT! what an EP! just brilliant! so i went to make the artwork yesterday and upload it, and somehow i discovered that there IS NO BEYONCE SONG CALLED 'LEMONADE'.

y'see, it turns out that i am soooo terribly out of touch with the mainstream that, when some arsenugget cheekily uploaded a song claiming to be 'Lemonade' by Beyonce, i totally believed it actually was. thinking it was the song i wanted, i downloaded it and made a whole damn album out of different approaches to remixing it, not realising IT WAS THE WRONG FUCKING SONG. (it was actually some song called 'One Woman Army' by someone called Grace Capristo. exactly - who the fuck is Grace Capristo? not Beyonce, that's for sure.) so yeah, i now have this whole 48 minutes of wasted time and effort on my computer, and a deep and palpable knowledge of exactly how irrelevant and alienated i am from normal society.

but instead of throwing in the musical towel, i just went and grabbed some of the REAL Beyonce songs (double-checking this time), and did it all over again with the same Audiomulch set-ups, only even better. i actually dig this set of songs even more than the original stuff. CRISORTUNITY!

so, really, this EP is officially titled 'COMPOP 23.2: LEMONS' or something, i guess, if you need it for your catalogues or something.

“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