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Evolution Control Committee
by Liz Armstrong December 30, 2004 August 19, 2021
In high school I had a creepy older pen pal who incessantly sent me mix tapes, and my favorite tracks were the fuzzy, slightly confusing contributions by the Evolution Control Committee, which combined slow, dumped-in-saggy-drawers beats, lewd lyrics, and grandma-candy melodic flourishes. ECC honcho Mark Gunderson–the O.G. of plunderphonics, plagiarhythm, mashups, what have you–has been a thorn in copyright puritans' sides since 1986, most famously for a 1993 college-radio hit that blended Herb Alpert's "Bittersweet Samba" and Public Enemy's "Rebel Without a Pause." Even CBS hates him: in 2000 Gunderson dug into Dan Rather's newscasts, chiseled out some hot-button words and phrases (desperation, shooting rampage, police brutality, funeral, cancer, death, cocaine), and worked them into a remix of AC/DC's "Back in Black," prompting the network to threaten a lawsuit. His peers generally try to make their tracks sound like cleaner, more bombastic remixes, but Gunderson's the Weird Al of this stuff, taking everybody down a notch; he'll turn the most rockingest Supertramp tune into a dusty, haunted, lo-fi piece of crap with all kinds of white noise and loud, inappropriate, fluttery rhythms. And you won't be watching him do it on some pristine silver Powerbook, either–Gunderson triggers samples with his own homebuilt contraptions, like a creepy-looking wired glove with thimble fingertips. Chromelodeon opens. Tue 1/4, 9 PM, Buddy, 1542 N. Milwaukee, 773-342-7332, $7. All ages.
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