Car Stereo (Wars)

"Frighteningly cool...quite possibly the hippest mash-up in history." --VH1.com (in reference to Ghostface Observatory)

- VH1.com

"F*cking awesome" -- Gorilla vs. Bear (in reference to Ghostface Observatory) - Gorilla Vs. Bear

Discovery of the Night: Car Stereo (Wars). Like hipster mashup whiz Girl Talk, only less manic, this Austin DJ slayed the crowd at Beauty Bar with a head-spinning set that spliced together, among other things, Depeche Mode, Tone Loc and Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend." Bonus points for the bizarro pairing of "Billie Jean" (Blender's #1 Song of the Past 25 Years) and "We Built This City" (Blender's Worst Song Ever).

--Blender Magazine - Blender Magazine

What's going on with the Austin DJ and club scene that, seemingly overnight, it's transformed into something akin to the Please Kill Me-era East Village NYC art-punk scene of three decades past? Reinvention, that's what.

Flashback to the last hours, minutes, seconds of 2006. At Beauty Bar, Car Stereo (Wars) pumps out a sonic barrage channeled into the champagne throng that packs the club's all-encompassing dance floor. Two guys, two turntables, one mixer, and one laptop are spinning emotional feedback loops of your favorite old-school dance staple retooled for a generation of permanent war footing: Prince's "1999" retooled by Chicks on Speed, a homemade do-over of Pulp's "Common People" that's even better than the original, ATX art-punk band Single Frame slamming into Miami's 2 Live Crew, and then, exactly at midnight, a stunning remix of – what else? – U2's "New Year's Day." From there, it just gets crazier, better, more Blondie.

Earlier, at Chris Rose's Super!Alright! HQ, which serves as both home to the film and video collective Super!Alright! and Car Stereo (Wars)'s day job/think tank, Rose explains that his partner Adreon Henry and he "combine hip-hop that we like with indie rock that we like and then force people to listen to it and love it."

Which is as good an explanation of mash-up culture as any other.

"Mash-ups get people interested in new music by mixing it up, via laptop software like Tractor, with older stuff they may already know," continues Rose. "I've done a half a dozen mash-ups so far. The first was 'Ghostface Observatory,' which combines Ghostface Killah's track 'Be Easy' with Ghostland Observatory's 'Midnight Voyage.' What's funny is that I did it as a joke when a friend of mine said I ought to try doing a mash-up. I did it in, like, 20 minutes. That worked out so well, I did another Ghostland Observatory mashed with Kelis' 'Bossy.'"

Don't get too comfortable, though. Car Stereo (Wars)'s impossibly fun live sets are about to change as live percussion, a notable but off-the-record female vocalist, and video projection/mixing enter the picture as Rose and Henry do mad prep work for their upcoming SXSW 07 showcase.

"Which is awesome, insane, and really, really weird," Rose says, "because we kind of applied as a joke. So that's our goal for March – go crazy with it and do as much as we can as far as taking it to the next level."

--Austin Chronicle - Austin Chronicle