KIDS & EXPLOSIONS

Some of you are probably already familiar with Josh Raskin and his project Kids and Explosions.

I, on the other hand, was not.. and his new album ‘Shit Computer’ has been laying on my desk for about 2 weeks now.

I was intrigued by the cover, both front and back. I finally opened the sucker yesterday… I had been cheating myself for weeks…..

This album is so f*cking sweet!!!

These songs are not ‘mash-ups’, they’re better. Raskin’s brain works in a way that I, for one, cannot fathom.

This is art…

If you are in any of the following areas, go out and have a great night… if you’re not, stay home and buy this record:



07.18 WASHINGTON, DC. DC 9.
07.19 NEW YORK, NY. Mercury Lounge.
07.21 ANTIGONISH, NS. Evolve Festival.
07.31 MADISON, WI. The Frequency.
08.01 MINNEAPOLIS, MN. 400 Bar.
08.02 KANSAS CITY, MO. The Record Bar.
08.03 DES MOINES, IA. Vaudeville Mews.
08.04 CINCINNATI, OH. MOTR Pub.
08.05 CLEVELAND, OH. Beachland Ballroom.
08.07 PITTSBURGH, PA. Brillobox.

*NOMINEE FOR LOVESOUND ALBUM OF THE YEAR

LoveSound Rating – 9/10

Favorite Tracks – ‘Babies Are The Future’ & ‘You’re Good’

Kids & Explosions – www.KidsAndExplosions.com - LoveSound Magazine

Mash-up is an ill-fitting term. I always imagine a squashed tomato. The art of making it and performing it is really more akin to sculpture. To do it takes a near omniscient understanding of music, a track collection to rival the Library Of Congress and a set of well-trained ears. Josh Raskin of Kids And Explosions has all three. But the Canadian artist is not in the business of building dance-floor atom bombs. He’ll hardly count himself among the freshman class of either the Girl Talk or 2 Many Djs school of thought. Raskin goes more the route of independent studies, spending time, mostly alone, deconstructing songs and arranging the standout hooks, beats and lyrics that blend best to him.

Raskin is a Toronto native. His musical beginnings are rooted in DJing, which he’s been doing for longer than he can remember. “I was always torn between making weird beats with computers and writing sad guitar songs,” explains Raskin, “until a few years ago when I realized I could kinda do everything at the same time.” His choice samples are typically from sad songs, the acoustic plucking on Iron And Wine’s rendition of “Such Great Heights” for instance. The rap verse, such a versatile and ear-fondling remix device, gets like treatment. Selections include Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” which Raskin cuts up to the point Em’s underdog anthem is near unrecognizable. The result heightens the themes of confusion and frustration in the original. Raskin is at his best on “There Is A Burning Ball Of Fire In Outer Space” where he blends the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Suicidal Thoughts” with Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor.” “The best thing about making music is discovering two things that are amazing on their own but combine to make something entirely new, either musically or conceptually,” says Raskin.

Most of the songs on his album, Shit Computer, came together in a “complex series of accidents.” The process begins by voraciously consuming music. “I can listen to an album on loop for months,” says Raskin, only stopping whenever he’s recording. He searches out connections in the songs he loves, most of which you’ll recognize, and goes to work blending them. A song contains three or four recognizable elements but with Raskin’s distinct signature left on them. He uses most a kind of stutter effect to switch up timing on notes or meaning on lyrics.

Raskin is an Oscar nominee and an Emmy winner but not for his music. He’s part of a trio that made “I Met The Walrus,” an animated short derived from a taped interview with John Lennon in 1969. A 14-year-old Jerry Levitan snuck into the Beatle’s hotel room in Toronto, reel-to-reel recorder in hand, to interview him. When Levitan grew up he came across some of Raskin’s student work as an animator and a filmmaker and pitched a project to him. Levitan had a full-length documentary in mind, but Raskin favored doing it as an animated short. With the tape, an illustrator and a designer, Raskin locked himself into a studio and cranked out the project. Aside from the Emmy win and the Oscar nod, Raskin and co. netted for themselves near two and a half million views on YouTube.

His next undertaking is a tour, beginning in February. He’s also working on a music video for his song “Swear Words.” “It’s like Guitar Hero but horrible,” says Raskin. A second album is in the works to be released soon. “Soon” is relative to how fast or slow Raskin pieces together his next collage. - CMJ

Spinner joined forces with the Red Bull Music Academy and Young Lions Music Club for the Artist Select Series at Toronto live music hotspot The Garrison during CMW's Canadian Music Fest. The first two nights were curated and hosted by, respectively, Canadian rapper Shad and Jeremy Greenspan of Hamilton, ON heroes Junior Boys.

We've captured video from the event, including highlights from Toronto singer-producer-rapper Slakah the Beatchild's new project, The Slakadeliqs and local Oscar-nominated filmmaker-turned-remix artist Kids & Explosions, who describes himself as "a boy who makes songs by stealing other people's songs and making them worse" but was more aptly introduced by Shad as "mind-blowing."

Greenspan's bill featured a turn from electronic pop experimentalist Airbird, a New York artist also known as Joel Ford who has most recently been making music as part of Ford & Lopatin. Greenspan predicts, and with reason, that Airbird "will undoubtedly be getting huge attention all over the place."

Come back tomorrow for video from the final 'Artist Select' bill curated by Broken Social Scene's Brendan Canning. - Spinner

Kids & Explosions is a “boy who makes songs by stealing other people’s songs and making them worse,” like Girl Talk on some kind of noxious bootleg Loko/drank/steroids concoction. Sigur Ros x Notorious B.I.G. x Beyonce x Berlin = “There is a Burning Ball of Fire in Outer Space.” Best enjoyed in the context of kidsandexplosions.com: - Gorilla Vs Bear

"On my iPod right now is a song called 'Swear Words' by Kids & Explosions. This guy takes different pieces of artist's music and binds them together to make a separate song. So it's a really really smart, innovative album and um... it's probably my favorite album of last year." - YouTube

Continuing along the idea of referential culture and pop-mashing, I want to write a bit about something I've been more than a little in love with as of late. Kids & Explosions is a musician whose work is no doubt polarizing. Simple googling of his nom-de-pc will turn up more than a handful of articles making the inevitable comparisons to the massively popular Girl Talk. The main difference, I've been able to ascertain, is that while Girl Talk has masterfully crafted his mash-ups to become a giant party mix that makes revelers say "Aha!", Kids & Explosions' ouvre seems to suggest more of a deconstruction of cherished and personal selections. Instead of taking a hook or chorus or instantly placable piece of history, K&E takes fragments that are less identifiable, less obvious, but more meaningful and in an odd way, more personal.

The resulting album, S*** Computer, available for whatever you wish to pay. somehow feels more cohesive, organic even, when listened to as a whole. Instead of one massive mega-mix for parties, separate songs are established and realized by a musical alchemy of sorts. As pointed out in this break down Josh Raskin observed several rules for his construction of this album. While it's admirable that rule one was "The songs have to mean something to him" I think the real essence or trick lies in two and three - no effects applied and no pitch shifting what so ever. By breaking down songs and piecing them back together via similarities the original artists never intended, the resulting product is both novel and familiar. It bridges that gap in our minds where we know something and yet are figuring it out. Its as if the entire album exists in that transitional moment of recognition, which is an astounding accomplishment in my mind. It's as though you were falling in love forever, or permanently tasting a new dish with every bite. Along these lines, the music created by adding say, two samples together, creates not just the one on top of the other, as is often the case with mash-ups, but actually touches on a third separate song that until now may have existed, albeit only potentially. The musical equivalent of potential energy, if you will.

An interesting cheat or caveat to the aforementioned rules is that while there is no pitch shifting to be found, there are deconstructions, tweaks and clear rearrangements. In the first minute of the album it's apparent Eminem's vocals have been chopped up and reordered. What we hear is odd - it feels like you're hearing the song you know, yet because it's in a manner that flips your expectations, as well as over the piano chords of Bryan Adam's 'Everything I Do', your mind again construes it as having been previously experienced yet feeling entirely unfamiliar. The product is thoroughly uncanny. To reiterate what I stated earlier, the feeling of two or more preexisting pieces coming together to create a unique third piece is akin to procreation, which Raskin jokes about in the aforementioned interview with Laura Lanktree. He describes it as songs "having sex" and the results feel suitably organic despite the buzzes and twists. One could guess the title of the album refers to the idea of a hard drive crashing and we're hearing the neurons cross-firing, like HAL in 2001 as it sings 'Daisy' during shutdown.

A further distinction from his Mash-Up bretheren lies in the mood of the album, which instead of being a thumping club banger, is more wistful and even haunting at times. Josh Raskin has made choices and discoveries via his palate that have meshed incredably well. I feel like it serves better as music for a small gathering for cocktails than ripping up a houseparty. Maybe I'm just getting older. OR maybe I'm just playing favorites. To be perfectly honest I didn't even have my ear to the ground. Rather, I stumbles across the album via Popmatter's excellent year-end list of the best free music of 2010. Looking to broaden horizons without breaking any laws (which, given the legal grey area of sampling to this extent is more than a little bit ironic) I checked out their recommendations and was blown away by what I had found. Among the many awesome recommendations was Kids & Explosions.

While the list I linked above is filled with excellent new music, please give a listen to Kids & Explosions, if for no other reason than to hear the future of our modern culture twisting referentiality into a genre of music. - jTOYCEN

Mash-ups have gained a lot of credibility between the fall of Danger Mouse's infamous Grey Album and the rise of Girl Talk's overwhelming mega-mixes. There's just something marvelous about hearing seemingly mismatched ideas work together, as two worlds collide to a heavy beat.

Rather than highlighting music's differences, Kids & Explosions' Josh Raskin mixes songs together based on their surprising common ground, making them blend rhythmically and melodically. In "Use Your Words," Raskin takes apart the somber piano chords of Emily Haines' "The Maid Needs a Maid.” He even touches her vocals up to have her mouth the words, "I love you" and "You are made for me" — sentiments far outside her song's original message.

More surprising is the harmonious entrance of an Ol' Dirty Bastard vocal off the hit song "Shimmy Shimmy Ya." Raskin even peppers the background with acoustic guitars from Beck's Sea Change, and it all fits. Who knew? A few Lauryn Hill verses hit the mix to top things off, but they're relentlessly split into spare words and consonants. With nothing unchanged or unedited, "Use Your Words" finds the true meaning of collage. - NPR

While his identity and even location remain mostly unknown, mash-up artist Kids & Explosions describes himself as "a boy who makes songs by stealing other people's songs and making them worse." In reality, what he's doing is taking the mash-up and turning it into cut-up hip-hop with heart-wrenching pop appeal.

Shit Computer, his debut album, has the ADD switches of Girl Talk, the pop appeal of Danger Mouse's Grey Album and the eternally cut-up vocal patterns of early Prefuse 73. The result is the sort of album that basically no one can resist. Take, for example, "There Is a Burning Ball of Fire in Outer Space," which sees Notorious B.I.G. baring his soul over Sigur rós while Destiny's Child offer some hope in the chorus.

?Download Shit Computer, from a pay-what-you-want model, here. Or stream the album on Kids & Explosions' official site, complete with pixelated animated GIFs. - Exclaim!

Mash Ups. In 20 years we’re gonna look at these things and say “God, that’s so -00?. If most of internet is porn, then I’m sure the second most abundant thing on the web is mashups, mostly terrible ones. We’re past the time where these things could live off their novelty factor, and it takes more for people to be impressed than just the idea of putting two polarized artists on one track (“Oh my god! Destiny’s Child and Nirvana!”). I guess mashups is a natural next step for DJ’s to flaunt their skills. Flaunting turntable skills doesn’t impress the same way it did cause we’ve got software that can automate a lot of it. Only the purists still dig on old school techniques. The best way to show your DJ skills today seem to be to show how you’re able to find matching songs to create a new one. Sort of.

Regardless, mashups can be undeniably fun. And sometimes, there’s an artists that really pushes the envelope. Girl Talk does, with his absolutely insane mashup-on-coke-albums. But his albums mainly works at parties, or when I’m working out. I can’t find myself listening to his stuff at home, while working or relaxing. However, I just might have found a contender for Girl Talk: Kids & Explosions.

Kids & Explosions debut album Shit Computer isn’t a fluid experience like a Girl Talk album. And it’s not a “party”-mix. He ventures in the same universe of pop and hip hop as Girl Talk, and to an extent he tries to evoke the same “Oh! I know that song!”-feeling that Girl Talk does. If you found some of Girl Talks musical combination’s sacrilegious(The Ramones and Missy Elliot, Miley Cyrus with anything), then this album is going to make your head explode. Not only does K&E mix polarizing artists, he cuts the samples up, glitches them up and generally fucks them up till the point where they’re barely recognizable. This has a particularly awesome effect on some of the hip hop samples, where the rapping is cut up and made into incoherent dribble. It makes for one insane listen, and an awesome ride. This isn’t a mix, it’s a collage. And it’s taking it one step further. I actually find this a more comfortable listen than the Girl Talks albums. While those tend to become a bit exhausting and repetitive (all the tracks generally follow the same build-up), this album constantly surprises, is sonically interesting and a far more comfortable listen. - STRANGER BY THE MOMENT

Check out the album Shit Computer by Kids & Explosions if you're into glitchy mash-ups of popular music!

The music sounds like The Field, but with an added hip-hop flavour. See how many samples you can spot!

This is by far the most interesting album I've heard all year! It's a postmodernist Grey Album for the YouTube generation! Amazing!

Kudos to Anthony Fantano at The Needle Drop for directing me towards this release! Check out his review of the album here! - The Record Shelf

Kids & Explosions' debut album is a spastic and relentless collage of pop's catchiest moments. Instead of allowing one sample to simply play over another, K&E dives in deep to each sample and tears it into little, tiny pieces; making everything work together rhythmically and melodically.

I realize some moments aren't all that subtle, and that this record gets pretty relentless with its edits; however, this interests me because it's the true meaning of collage music.

Everything is destroyed and rebuilt using the scrap. Pretty inspiring. - the needle drop

If you ever wondered what it would be like if Girl Talk was more interesting. Fo’ free, from him. Stream it there. Recommended tracks: Everything, Hand of Action, and There is a Burning Ball of Fire in Outer Space. - paus los angeles

Mashup albums can go quite sour quite easily, they can sound derivative and repetitive due to their nature. Kids & Explosions side-steps this and comes out swinging. This album isn’t just beat-matching and crossfading, it’s full of clever edits that make you re-think the source of the sample.

A great example of this is Hand of Action which takes that massive C chord from the beginning of Arcade Fire’s Wake Up and chops it creating unfathomable dynamics from it, then brings the intro from Plainsong by The Cure creating a blissful contrast.

The source material for this album is quite eclectic. Taking from Iron & Wine, White Stripes, Cyndi Lauper, Notorious B.I.G and Sigur Rós. The latter two feature alongside Destiny’s Child in the melancholy There is a Burning Ball of Fire in Space. Which accomplishes what most mashup albums fail at which is matching lyrics not just beats and melodies.

Beautifully catchy and at times heart-wrenching. A must grab for any mashup or hiphop fans. The album is available at a pay-as-you-want rate here. - drop-d

Yesterday, one of my new obsessions, Babe Rainbow aka Cameron Reed tweeted about mysterious producer Kids & Explosions, “who makes songs by stealing other people’s songs and making them worse.” He had in turn heard about through Gorillavsbear.

Kids & Explosions are basically Girl Talk’s bratty little brother and Shit Computer is basically a kick to Greg Gillis’s hairy face. Like Girl Talk Kids & Explosions boldly mixes well-know indie and classic rock riffs with hip-hop verses. But where Gillis kind of just beat-matches and then lets it ride (particularly on 2008's Feed the Animals), Kids & Explosions grabs the tunes by the collective balls and manipulates them to his own whims, chopping and cutting them up until they resemble something else entirely. So while there’s still the joy of recognition with each new sample that’s introduced, but the whole is far more than the sum of its parts.

Yeah, yeah, without Girl Talk, Kids & Explosions probably wouldn’t even exist, but so is life in the pop-culture hype machine. I stand by what I said until Gillis drops a new record blah, blah blah, whatever. Listen and enjoy. - If the Music's Loud Enough

Mash-ups are some finicky bullshit. Most mash-up artists these days are too busy being hipsters to actually mash good music together. Others will often resort to simply laying a couple songs over one another that happen to be in the same time signature and hope it appeals to the masses. It is rare that an artist will insert enough of their own artistic touch to impress me with a mash-up. It takes a fucken lot.

With that being said, new to the scene, we have Kids & Explosions. With his first record released as of mid-October, it's quite the banging interception for a lot of AotY lists. What separates this release from the pack is its sounds of Unstoppable-era Girl Talk glitch MASTERY combined with the super clean production style of newer Girl Talk. Though they are parallels that must be drawn and compared against for any mash-up release, this album goes above and beyond most anything Greg Gillis has ever, or will ever do. The beats and lyrics--from start to finish--are masterfully crafted into unique compositions, giving new life and meaning to every single track used. Do not pass off a moment of this album as noise you have heard on the radio before. Everything is where it needs to be at all times. And all for good reason.

Deeply fun and surprisingly meaningful. Hopefully, a producer to look out for more in the near future.
9/10 - SheepSkin

It's hard to say exactly what Kids and Explosions produces on his debut release; his dense, textural mixes seems to divert from the blatant "sample combo" method of fellow mash-up artists. However calling tracks such as "Winning Is Easy" a genuine song seems to be missing the point. The man behind the moniker, Josh Raskin, is in the business of destroying samples, manipulating them and beating them up to the point where they're still presentable, but stripped of all the context of their original creation. Raskin has no problem with tangling John Cale's emotive performance of the classic "Hallelujah" and degrading it into mere instrumentation, but what vocal performances are kept in their human form sound like echos, making rap verses sound like nostalgic memories over somber pop instrumentation. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of his mash-ups is the constant reminder that he is the producer, leaving no samples safe from his palette of glitch effects and choppy layering. Shit Computer is not a reflection of society, but rather a parallel universe to modern pop culture, a separate world composed entirely from past events.

A point where Josh Raskin truly outdoes his peers is his approach to the instrumentation of the tracks; instead of using a basic motif to lead through songs, or even sections of songs, he hazily mixes small clips of varied instrumentation and layers them to a near indistinguishable point. His musical compositions are akin to the techniques of The Books, filled with small atonal clips and melodic intertwinements that peak at numerous, isolated moments. While the preemptive goal of pluderphonics musicians often aims for creating what sounds like genuine songs, Raskin's mixes exceed the point of mash-up art and feels like inspired music. While the album wastes little time giving special attention to certain artists, "There Is A Burning Ball of Fire In Outerspace" is a beautiful exception, a sublime duet between the keyboard works of "Untitled 1" and the depressive rapping of Biggie's "Suicidal Thoughts". It comes off as the only song on the album and it's pure musical bliss, a truly miraculous, emotive creation that is one of the easy contenders of song of the year. Shit Computer sets new standards for mash-up artists, bringing a sound that's been explored by internet artists throughout the years and perfecting it in one solid LP. Josh Raskin's debut will have you spending minimal time on sample guessing, but rather entice the listener with a tour-de-force of fractured sounds and pop samples that have been decimated permanently. This sinks in faster than most feel-good music. - Sputnik Music

The world of sample heavy mashup music is a well worn path; there are some artists who produce results indicative of a deep record collection (Girl Talk) and some who are equally as uninspired as they are sparse (Hood Internet). Kids & Explosions, a.k.a. filmmaker Josh Raskin, manipulates samples to a point where they are nearly unrecognizable. K&E often opts for omitting parts of the verses, and deftly folds the samples together to make a glitchy structured, organic sound. The opening guitar riff from “Sweet Child Of Mine” kicks off opening track “Everything”, and closes with Notorious B.I.G.’s ‘Party Bullshit”. “Swear Words” drops every expletive from recent music memory over Iron & Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights”. “Small Problems” is equal parts Sam Cooke, Kanye and Mike D’Abo, a rare floor filler for the normally reserved artist. Sigur Ros, Biggie, and Berlin come together on the album’s highlight “There is a Burning Ball of Fire In Space”. A welcome game changer to a normally stagnant genre. - SEE Magazine

First of all, and before you hear the inevitable comparisons from journalists that are somehow lazier than I am, Kids & Explosions does not sound like Girl Talk. The art of making music using the pastiche method of combining elements from existing pieces of music with other elements of existing pieces of music has become such common practice that people tend to confuse regular producers with mash-up artists, or worse, all of the above with Girl Talk. Rather than utilising nostalgic references and ADHD post-ironic pop culture twisters for the benefit of a party (like the Gregg Gillis’ frequently mentioned fraternity project, or 2manydjs), Josh Raskin has sat and watched that Four Loko-fuelled bandwagon roll away while piecing together ADD jams that favour melancholic glitches with expertly placed vocal samples that manage to evoke shoegaze textures and even post-rock build-ups every so often. The end result is a collection of songs that are at once listenable, memorable, bittersweet, quietly arousing and head-nodding.

Whether it’s when the layers of ‘Babies Of The Future‘ collide as RZA ‘brings the motherfucking…’ crescendo that refuses to conclude in a ruckus, or when ‘Swear Words‘ works as a comprehensive guide to exactly what the song title suggests over twee guitars we’re continuously presented with an oxymoron so obvious it would sound terrible if anyone else was making it. But it’s anything but terrible, and when album highlight ‘Use Your Words‘ builds from gentle piano and soft female vocal sampling to Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s ‘oh baby I like it raw’ line, recontextualised into one of the most beautiful, heart-wrenching things you could ever hear, you’ll be hitting the replay button more frequently than Josh has hit ctrl+v making the damn thing. - Crossfire

Toronto-based computer nerd Josh Raskin released Shit Computer, his debut album as Kids & Explosions, through a pay-what-you-want model on his website. That paired with the fact that his music is entirely sample-based would naturally bring some heavy Girl Talk comparisons, but where Girl Talk draws on mainstream referencing and party-starting, Kids & Explosions crafted a cohesive, emotionally charged album that just happens to source the Notorious B.I.G. and Kanye West. - Exclaim!

Late or go home. Seriously. I was having a hard time choosing which Shit Computer track I was going to share with you this afternoon. It’s not often that I’m completely, like fucking completely, taken by a record. So I kicked around a couple favorites. Maybe “Use Your Words.” Maybe “Sad Party.” Maybe “Everything.” Fuck it, “Everything” it is. Imagine a thinking man’s Girl Talk. A mashup that really isn’t even a mashup at all, but a completely new song in itself. With completely different emotions and themes and meanings and just go fucking pick this up. - Nothing Sounds Better

Though often unfair, comparisons are inevitable when talking about music. They provide reference points for new styles and artists we're still trying to fully understand. Case in point, Toronto, ON DJ Kids & Explosions (aka Josh Raskin). Upon listening to his chopped mash-up record, Shit Computer, Girl Talk and his hyperactive sample-fests immediately come to mind.

Speaking of his recent release, Raskin admits to Exclaim! he's a "huge fan" of the Pittsburgh, PA-based DJ who has become the poster boy for mash-ups. So why then do we need Kids & Explosions when we've already got Greg Gillis?

"The biggest similarity is that we both use pop music as our instrument," Raskin says. But their end goals, he explains, are entirely different. "What he does is dance music and I'm not trying to be dance music. There are a lot of obvious similarities, but I feel like he's making music to make a party go off and I feel like I make music to make people move back to their mom's houses."

Raskin first came upon with his chopped-up pop music sound back in 2006, with no idea who Girl Talk was. "I'd played a show [in Toronto] and I'd played a show in Montreal. About a month later, a friend of mine who was at the Montreal show called me and he said, 'This guy is on the radio in North Carolina and he's doing what you do, but getting famous for it.'"

The comparisons will persist, Raskin says, due more to the recent rise in mainstream popularity of the genre than a misunderstanding of him or his music. "Because this kind of music hasn't been around for that long, it's easy to make those comparisons," he says. "But after a while it will be the same as saying Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash are the same because they both play the guitar." - Exclaim!

In a time where anyone with a computer and the internet has the ability to create their own mixes, its not everyday that a completely fresh sound hits the music scene. Yet there is always that one exception, and he happens to go by the name Kids & Explosions.

Instead of just mixing together sounds with similar BPMs or tempos, Kids & Explosions pushes the sonic limits of songs by infusing insane amounts of glitches and breaks to the beats, creating a completely new take on popular Hip-Hop, Soul, Rap and Rock records.

With the debut album Shit Computer offered for free (or name your own price!) on his website, Kids & Explosions has set himself up for the perfect path to success. 17 tracks of mash-ups including the songs and sounds of everyone from Drake to Arcade Fire to Beyonce , the songs of Kids & Explosions provide a great album of music for any fan of mash-ups or just great music in general. Check the links below where you can download the Kids & Explosions debut Shit Computer in its entirety, as well as check out some sweet visuals for a lot of the songs. - Stereo/Pirate

Have you ever wondered what Notorious B.I.G. mixed with Sigur Rós, Destiny’s Child and the Righteous Brothers might sound like? Me neither, but it’s better than you could have possibly imagined!

To say that Kids & Explosions’ debut album Shit Computer is a brilliant success would be an understatement. The hottest new mash-up DJ out of Toronto is humble about his art too, Kids & Explosions describes himself as “a boy who makes songs by stealing other people’s songs and making them worse” – Kids & Explosions.

Do not let his modesty fool you, K&E has the unnatural ability to seamlessly combine several samples into each of his songs creating a musical hodgepodge that is entirely its own. K&E differentiates himself from other mash-up DJs in 2 other very distinct ways.

The first difference I noticed between Shit Computer and other mash-up albums is K&E’s use of more obscure samples. One of the qualities that make this album so special is the vast array of different sounds used and how they come together to complement each other so well. Unlike so many other so-called mash-up artists, Kids & Explosions does not just mix two mainstream, identifiable club hits together to make a club super-hit.

K&E’s careful consideration and selection of samples to employ becomes more and more evident as the album progresses. I admire his ability to blend a diverse lexicon of samples that are seemingly contradictory in either sound or lyrical content and position them against one another to create a juxtaposition of genres or content. An example of this brilliant juxtaposition is track 16, where lyrically he pits Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” against Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” making a comment about the duality between the frailty of life and the determination of the human spirit.

The second unique quality I noticed in Shit Computer is that Kids & Explosions in many of his songs uses lyrics and voices as more of a percussion instrument than anything else. In this way, his use of chopped up lyrics act as part of the beat rather than to form cohesive sentences. This interesting element of Shit Computer is most noticeable in tracks 1, 5 and 14.

Kids & Explosions is most certainly not afraid to experiment with genres, word play, and samples other DJs wouldn’t touch with a 40-foot record needle.

Shit Computer in its glorious entirety is available for “pay-what-you-can” download from the Kids & Explosions website ($0 is an option for you poor students out there that still enjoy great music). Not only does this fantastic, young, Canadian artist deserve a little of your attention, NOT checking out this album is doing a serious disservice to your ears. - The Ontarion

There's an excitement that comes with stumbling across a transfiguration of a genre - an artist who has taken an established type of music, twists it around, and flips it on its head. Kids & Explosions does just that, doing for the mash-up what Girl Talk did for the remix. Kids & Explosion's version of the multi-track mash is a frantic, disjointed one, but in a brilliantly fluid sort of way. The herky-jerky moves of the tracks on Shit Computer somehow combine to form a beautiful whole, in an inexplicable kind of way.

Like Girl Talk, Kids & Explosions invites you to play name-that-sample throughout the entirety of the album. More than that, he creates an interesting rhythm that transcends pop to become something one step further. The entire album is pretty incredible, so I feel a bit weird pulling out a couple tracks to share. Nevertheless, check out a couple tunes below. And please, for the love of music, download the whole mixtape; it's pay-what-you-want, and if this doesn't deserve a couple dollars, I don't know what does. - www.thestureidexperiment.com