Big Pauper - Beyond My Means
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There’s a genius to finding harmony in seemingly incongruent sounds; there’s a kaleidoscopic vision to the mind’s ear that sees not differences but rather links between what most of us perceive as wholly different. It’s one thing to do this with a group of songs popularized in our culture (a la Girl Talk), but it’s something entirely different – not to mention almost mind-bending – when audio ripped from TV and film enters the fold.
Like experimental sound collage band Negativland before him, Portland’s Big Pauper recontextualizes a vast array of sounds culled from old records and his absolutely massive VHS collection. On his solo debut, Beyond My Means, art of the past is reborn as fresh and relevant content – whether it’s fragments of old songs or old TV/film dialogue from obscure sources (Portuguese horror, nunsploitation, etc.). Working with sound outside the realm of music, Big Pauper is like the avant-garde version of Girl Talk, turning an eclectic mix of media into a unified, harmonious whole. There’s something rather mesmerizing about the man’s ability to create songs almost exclusively out of VHS audio clips and vinyl rips, finding melody within the diversity of the source material.
