Rebound Books

In 2009 Kutiman released ThruYOU, an online music video project mixed from samples of YouTube videos. After disclosing his work to just twenty friends, Kutiman’s project spread virally across the web, racking up more than one million views in less than a week.

From the New Yorker interview “I play a little bit of almost every instrument. One day, last August, I was looking around on YouTube for new licks, you know, something for piano or guitar or drums. I found this guy playing drums—the first clip of “Mother of All Funk Chords.” I didn’t know Bernard Purdie was famous but I saw he had 100,000 views so I figured he was somebody, and the clip was so good, so funky. I found another video on YouTube that shows you how to download videos, so I took that Purdie clip and just started from there, grabbing other videos of people playing.

It took me about two months to make all the songs. I worked on them all at the same time, so I can’t really say which one took how long. I was working on it all the time—there was no day or night, really. When I was done, I sent the songs to a few friends and told them not to talk about the ThruYOU site until we were ready to tell more people. But one of my friends didn’t listen, I guess. The next day, I opened up my MySpace page and saw all these new friend requests and messages. People had found it, and after that, so many people tried to look at the site that the whole thing crashed. I got so many nice messages. One person called me “Jesus of YouTube.” I don’t think that’s right but it’s a good feeling.”