One of life’s great pleasures is when two seemingly disparate things come together to form something unexpectedly enjoyable. Just a few examples of clashing combos that come to mind are things like bacon and peanut butter, Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewart, and a metric ton of inventive musical mashups. Speaking on the latter type of merger, a Milwaukee musician recently released an unorthodox album that combines the work of two decidedly different projects and forges something surprisingly outstanding in the process.
PortisWu is the latest creation from Jason Todd. The longtime Def Harmonic member, who currently releases music as part of Shrinestone, says he has been thinking about combining material from Portishead and Wu-Tang Clan since his days DJing in the late ’90s.
“It was just a fantasy because Portishead never released a capella versions and Wu-Tang didn’t make very many either, so there was never the option to do it on turntables the analog way,” Todd tells Milwaukee Record. “Since technology brought us vocal extractor tools, I’ve been thinking of doing it every time either artist came up.”
After talking about the aural endeavor for years, Todd finally started the PortisWu mashup process last January. A year later, he finished it and posted it to Bandcamp under the Softie moniker last weekend. As the name suggests, the 59-minute release is, quite simply, a two-part production exercise that fuses vocal and instrumental elements of the seminal English trip-hop outfit with some bars and beats from the incomparable rap collective.
Todd tells Milwaukee Record he’s philosophically opposed to mashups in most cases because the process “typically cheapens things and degrades music into pure amusement,” but he recognizes a connection between the two artists in this case.
“In my view, there is a shared DNA in the music of Portishead and Wu-Tang Clan,” Todd says. “Although they come from quite different backgrounds, they both are, on some level, born of the effects of the psychosis caused by modern urban life, depression, obsession, and emotional intensity—not to mention the aesthetic similarities in the production of the music.”
It’s great, especially if you’re someone with even a passing interest in either project. If you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if Portishead and Wu-Tang Clan joined forces to create one genre-jumping super group, wonder no more! Listen to PortisWu now (and consider downloading it on the not-so-small chance it has to be pulled from the internet at some point).