Mashup the Music of Tel Aviv with This Interactive Keyboard

Remix master Kutiman puts his found sounds in your hands via browser-based sampler on new website 'Mix the City.'

by Beckett Mufson

March 13, 2015, 2:20pm

Images courtesy the artist, via

For years he's been capturing his first impressions of cities, from Krakow to Tokyo, through the ears and instruments of its inhabitants. But this time, mashup masterKutiman is putting his found sounds in the internet's hands, giving an interactive tour of Tel Aviv with Mix the City, a browser-based synthesizer that allows you to mix and match the sounds of 12 different street musicians, all from the comfort of your own keyboard.

For Kutiman, creating a sonic portrait of Tel Aviv was a challenge: he'd lived there before, and knew it too well to easily capture in a four-minute video. "I tried to capture how I feel about the city—a bit of the seaside, a bit of the traditional side, a bit of Jaffa, a bit of the modern side… it’s a mixed city," he says.

Kutiman's ear for picking out the best sounds was critical to Flying Object director Tom Pursey, who led the team behind the site's playable sampling interface. "He’d set himself a tough challenge: how to record 12 musicians, each playing two samples, in a way that meant that any combination of the above would work together and still sound good," Pursey says. "Quite how he managed to make this work so well is something that still surprises me." Kutiman mixed his new mashup, Thru Tel Aviv, on the Mix the City website, and now you can add your own take on the song here.

Check out the musicians Kutiman selected for Mix the City in action, below: