I love mashups. Ever since a producer called Danger Mouse took (in his own words) “a very white thing and a very black thing” to create the Grey Album, I’m amazed how combining two or more songs, samples or snippets can create a new experience that sheds a new light on the original material.

My current favorite mashup artists are The Kleptones, a.k.a. Eric Kleptone & friends, from Brighton, England. They’ve just released Uptime/Downtime (download page), a double album containing some of the finest and most original mashups around. Mixing together music and great soundbits, it provides something old, something new, most of it borrowed, and sometimes something blue. ;)

Follow these guys around on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or Last.fm. And book ‘em in your club! Now. Some of my favorite tracks from the last album behind the cut.

This has been circulating for a while now: Hitler & Gmail (youtube vid, dutch subtitles).

It’s a mashup I created to have a swing at one of the low hanging fruits of our ICT department: the inability for students to access their e-mail through the POP3 protocol. Since the services switched to Microsoft Exchange, this ‘feature’ is only available for university staff.

But I don’t want to talk about the POP3 issue itself ; It’s quite funny to see something I cooked up on a morning in time which could have been spent better get so much coverage. It attracted the attention of one of my professors (Erik Duval) too, since he has been featuring the vid in several presentations on the topic  of Personal Learning. More behind the cut.