(MCT Campus)

As you may have heard, Deskhop will be performing between sets at W.I.L.D. this Saturday. Deskhop mixes together vocal and instrumental clips from a wide variety of songs in unexpected and clever ways. Recently, Student Life had the opportunity to talk to the man behind the mashups and ask him a few questions.

Student Life: Who are you? Where are you from?

Deskhop: I’m Ian Wells. I’m from Massachusetts, but I go to school in New York at Cornell.

SL: How did you get started mixing songs together?

D: I didn’t really start wanting to remix stuff or mashup anything. I just started trying to produce music on the computer with a couple friends, and I was always kind of into cutting things up and splicing, and it sort of evolved out of that. We stopped recording our own music. I was working with a guitar player, but I went to college, and I didn’t have him around, so I started cutting up other people’s music.

SL: How do you decide to mix certain songs together?

D: It’s usually one of two ways. Either songs I like that I try to make work, and that’s guess and check really: I spend a ton of time trying to figure out what works. The other way is to figure out the notes and find songs in the same key and work from there. But it’s not always music that I enjoy. I don’t just pick songs that I like most of the time. It’s more like what works together.

SL: Do certain artists inspire you more than others?

D: I don’t know, I mean, I try to stay pretty pop oriented, so it’s recognizable. I think that a lot of the effect is having people recognize it. So, I mean, there’s certain pop songs that you can’t deny, they’re pretty good, even though they’re overplayed and they get tiresome. Anything catchy on the radio is potentially mixable, and there’s a lot of indie stuff that I’ll mix, which is more usually stuff that I’ll listen to on my own. Then, there’s some that it’s just fun to mix two things that really shouldn’t be together as sort of a mockery.

SL: What do you do to perform live?

D: I trigger everything live. I basically have a library of 10/15 second loops, which has been growing for the past year or so, since I’ve started playing live. So, I arrange them on the spot, just triggering them and seeing what happens. I have basic ideas of what should go together, but it all depends on what I do in the moment. It’s all little clips. I don’t have many long, drawn-out samples really, nothing more than 15/30 seconds.

SL: So is what you do live completely different than your album?

D: Yeah, it’s definitely different, but it still sort of has the same elements going on. I guess, in my tracks, it usually switches up every 30 seconds or so. The live sound is definitely less complex. I can do a lot more when I’m sitting down and editing, so when I’m doing it live, it’s more like whatever I can muster up in the moment.

SL: What separates you from other artists who make similar music or mixes?

D: I don’t really know that much about the other artists. I know it’s kind of catching on in this kind of niche genre. I mean, I listen to a little more, but usually listening to my own music is enough of mashup music, so I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you what separates me. It’s up to the listener, I guess.

SL: What’s your favorite song that you’ve made so far?

D: I mean, I guess I like a song called “Sex in B Minor,” which is really old. I made it in high school and it’s obviously the work of an amateur. It’s pretty rickety, but I like it just because it was kind of like my first major effort, and I did it with really primitive audio editing software.

Read more about the other performers at this fall’s W.I.L.D.: Method Man and Redman, Passion Pit and K’Naan.