mixtape maestro (2.0)

Just as they’ve hit the road as opening act for the American leg of Chromeo‘s Business As Casual Summer 2010 tour, NY duo Telephoned have gifted fans with another serving of their fetching not-quite-covers/ not-quite-mash-ups record re-imaginations with new mixtape Keep Their Heads Ringin’.

Doing just what the collection title promises, Ringin’ features vocalist Maggie Horn taking on everything from Rihanna’s “Rude Boy” and Led Zeppelin’s “What It Is and What Should Never Be” to a spliced-together reading of Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” and Sleigh Bells’ “Rill Rill”, with some, like a surprisingly awesome minute-long merging of The Cure’s “Friday I’m In Love” atop Young Money’s “BedRock” instrumental, begging for lengthier treatments.

Peep out two of our favorites below, remakes of Chromeo’s “Night By Night” (set to the soul sample lushness of Big Boi’s “Shine Blockas”) and Yeasayer’s “O.N.E.” (gone reggae over Gyptian’s “Hold Yuh”), or simply grab the entire mixtape through Fools Gold.

DL: “Night By Night (Chromeo x Big Boi Cover)” (alt)

DL: “O.N.E. (Yeasayer x Gyptian Cover)” (alt)

Fresh off Beyonce’s record-breaking six Grammy Award wins Sunday night (and a fiery, weave-tossing, Alanis-covering stage performance that only renewed our wishes for the diva to commit to recording an R&B-and-rock-themed album in the stylistic vein of En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind” or Janet Jackson’s “Black Cat”), Major Lazer and Elephant Man bring this cover of her Best Female Pop Vocal Performance-owning “Halo”, trading in the original lyric’s Hallmark beau praise for Elephant Man’s shower-singing growls about “haters”, “hypocrites” and “bad man”.

Yeah…we don’t get it either, though it does lead one to wondering if it means Beyonce and co-producer Ryan Tedder’s Coldplay-meets-boom-bap arrangement will become the new riddim du jour in 2010.

DL: “Halo (Beyonce Cover)” (alt)

In other Major Lazer-oriented news, someone else has taken upon themselves to give their endlessly re-tooled “Keep It Goin’ Louder” some brand new flavor. This time around, it’s those crazy Telephoned kids, chopping up and re-pasting together bits of the beloved single with re-sung elements from Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill”. Grab the results, from Telephoned’s new Off The Hook mixtape, below.

DL: Telephoned “Million Dollar Bill” (Major Lazer/ Whitney Houston Cover)” (alt)

Last May, we took notice of New York duo Telephoned and their awesome “postmodern takes” on rap hits from Soulja Boy and T-Pain, and drooled over their promise that more of these reinterpretations were to come.

Well, quite some time later, Maggie Horn and Sammy Bananas have finally fulfilled on that promise with this newest entry, a semi-cover of The-Dream’s woozy club jam “Rockin’ That Thang” that finds Horn cooing bite-sized lyrical snippets of the original atop a blissed out disco-house club soundbed.

Good stuff, even if we’re a lil’ bit disappointed Maggie couldn’t have blessed us with at least one go at the track’s “We beat it up like gorillas” line.

Telephoned’s self-titled debut EP arrives January 19th on Fool’s Gold.

DL: “Rockin’ That Thang (The-Dream Cover)” (alt)

DJ/ producer Sammy Bananas and singer Maggie Horn make up Telephoned, a duo out of New York whose sole gig apparently is to flip inescapable rap hits of recent memory into wicked, almost-unrecognizable clubby confections. But don’t dare label their efforts as “covers” or “remixes”, because, as their MySpace states, what the dual force are truly accomplishing is “(fashioning) a postmodern take on both”.

In their hands, Soulja Boy’s goofy anthem “Turn My Swag On” is transformed into a genre-blurring blob of cutesy pop, Southern rap spoofery and dubstep grime, with Horn committing the most precocious “Hopped up out of beeeeed…” wail we’ll probably ever hear and featured emcee, Ninjasonik’s Telli Federline, dishing out battle raps in support of “the average Joe who gotta work a job”.

Meanwhile, their excellent riff off of T-Pain’s ’08 slow jam “Can’t Believe It” simply consists of key elements of the original (that twinkly-eyed melody, that elongated “yeeee-ahh” hook/ ad-lib) sparsely sprinkled over one of those endlessly revolving 90′s-era party grooves.

Stay tuned to their MySpace, cause they plan to drop even more of these fantastic “non-cover” re-works in the future.

DL: “Turn My Swag On” (alt)

DL: “Can’t Believe It” (alt)