During the last week I have been enjoying the internet phenomenon that is All Day, the new album from Girl Talk.  I will admit that I have now reached the point of over-familiarity with it, and sometimes wonder if it is really little different from a gimmick like Jive Bunny or a work of genius.  Or both.

I have long had a soft spot for mashups, with a special fondness for Mark Vidler’s work at Go Home Productions, and Girl Talk is a similar project but is a whole album-length track made by splicing together bits from nearly 400 individual tracks from artists as diverse as 50 Cent, ELO, Madness and Katy Perry.  I was hooked right from the beginning (Black Sabbath mixed with Jay-Z and 2Pac).

The All Day experience goes a bit further though.  Illegal Art released a list of all the samples used and then people started updating the Wikipedia page with exactly where specific tracks are used. Next, somebody created a web page that would play the album and display the names of samples as they were used – as far as they could be identified.

That was cool enough, but now somebody else has expanded that idea on another site that visualises the same information.  Not only that, but you can play the album and choose from three different datasets for the visualisation – the Alldaysamples listing, the current live Wikipedia data, or the Wikipedia data as at Nov 21st. It really is a thing of beauty.

Awesome is an overused word, but I am a little bit awed by all this. Now I have to stop playing with these for a while so I don’t ruin the tracks for myself.  I’ve downloaded the whole thing and will put it on the mp3 player so that one day on random play it can surprise me.