News, info and works of Greek-American interdisciplinary artist, Ithaka (Ithaka Darin Pappas); visual artist, music-maker, writer, photographer, citizen biologist & saltwater nomad (surfer). Lives between LA, CDMX and AkahtiLândia, Brasil. Ithaka official instagram: @_ithaka_ #sogetup #ithaka #ithakadarinpappas
Showing posts with label So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas. Show all posts
Ithaka Darin Pappas writer/vocalist of "So Get Up"
Underground Sound Of Lisbon featuring Ithaka – So Get Up (1994)
So Get Up was Portugal's home-grown club anthem and a track that instigated the country’s move away from just rock and fado music. Initially released as the B-side to their 1994 Chapter One track it features a doom-forecasting monologue – “The end of the world is upon us, pretty soon it will all turn to dust” – from Greek- Californian artist and vocalist Ithaka Darin Pappas. A hard-thumping and squelchy acid monster in the same continuum lineage as music by Joey Beltram and Hardfloor, So Get Up took on the world when the Tribal America label licensed it and gave it to Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia to remix.
SO GET UP - lyrics and vocals by Ithaka.
Publishing: Ravenshark Music/Scion Four Music/ASCAP
See his new vocal-only album entitled
"So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas"
released by Sweatlodge Records. https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ithaka2
___________________________________________
Also titled,
Ithaka's
"So Get Up" vocals and lyrics have been used on tracks mixed by:
Underground Sound Of Lisbon, Junior Vasquez, Danny Tenaglia, Orion's
Voice, Sarasite, Committee, Public Domain, Stretch & Verne,
Marcel, Fatboy Slim, Atlantis ITA, Ce Ce Lee, PC, Miss Kittin, K-Trax,
High Voltage, Dyla, Mert Yücel, Eric Kupper, King-Size, Dan Robbins, Low
End Specialists, Architect, Meat Katie, Phobia, Lexicon Avenue, Dave
Seaman, Mowree, Sharp & Smooth, Alex Bass, David Mimram, Phunk
Investigation, DJ Zorneus, Lochness DJ Team, Maziano, Dantim, Seikos,
Pathfinder, Andrea Doria & Dino Lenny, Philippe Rochard, Bart
Skils, Hakan Sarigul, Derek Mari, Danny Garlick, Black Force, Armin Van
Buuren, Hardwell, Cosmic Gate, Heartbeat, Bob Ray & Van Dyuk,
Furio Levant, Koozah, Ben Gold, Pelari, Igor Carmo, Swing Kings, JJ
Mullor, Dani Sbert, Micromakine, Atmozfears, Acti & Antolini,
TNT, Technoboy, Razat, Joseph LP, Alex Page, Feed, Lee Burridge,
FuturePlays, Samir Kuliev, Armin Van Buuren, Rui Flip, Geometric Dark,
Alex Di Stefano, Nell Silva, etc, etc, etc.
Thru
the years, So Get Up Has been released by the labels: Armada Music
[Netherlands], Wake Your Mind [Germany], Nervous Records [USA], Kaos
Records [Portugal], Tribal Records [USA], Tribal Records [UK}, Twisted Records (U.S.), Twisted Records (UK), Plastic City
[Germany], Sweatlodge Records [USA], Absolutely Records [Italy], Kontor
records, 24 Records [Italy], Skint, Bosphorus Underground Recordings
[Turkey], Chuvstvo Ritma Records [Russia], Black Hole Recordings
[Netherlands], Elektrobeats Records [Italy], Forensic Records [UK],
Mental Madness Records [Germany], Groove Records [Switzerland], Hymen
Records [Germany], Trance Corporation Recordings [Spain], Titanic
Records [Italy], Hardcore Maniacs [Spain], Party Label Unique Records
[Netherlands], Desire Records [Portugal], Black Habitat Records, People
Tech Records [Venzuela], HARDwithSTYLE Records [Netherlands], Subground
Records [Italy], Memory Stick Records [Netherlands], Union Recordings
[Poland], Supermarket Records, Orange Groove Recordings, Doctors Of
Chaos Records [Italy], Next Cyclone Records [Italy], Elektrobeats
Records [Italy], Digital+ Records [Spain], Bliss Point Records [Turkey],
Activa Records [Italy], Afterglow Records [Germany], Sector Beatz
[Switzerland], Re-Fuel Records [Netherlands], Fabric Records [UK],
Dogmain Records [Portugal], PTP Records [Germany], Bit Music [Spain],
Sys-X Records [Netherlands], Spot On Records [UK], Overodose Records
[Germany], Lost Paradise Records, BZRK Records [Netherlands], Kontor
Records, 24 Records [Italy], Skint, Renegade Hardware [UK], Melody Maker
Records [Italy], Tronic [Sweden], Mole Listening Pearls [Germany],
Refreshed [Germany], etc, etc, etc.
So Get Up and its
derivitives have been written about by: Ariya Beitollahi, Ryan Farber,
Steph Evans, Hugh Lurcott, Hannah DeuPree, etc.
For publications such as: Mix Max, Daily Beat, Insomniac, Earmilk, DJ Maj, Mix Mag, etc
In
early, 2017, Los Angeles-based independent music label, Sweatlodge
Records will release the seventh album by the Californian songwriter,
Ithaka, entitled, So Get Up & The Lost Acapellas. The record will
include thirteen of Ithaka's vocalized poems (without music), many of
which were written during 1992 and 1993, two of the six years that the
artist lived in Lisbon. Also, as a bonus track, the original 1993
demo-version of So Get Up will appear.
There
in Portugal, Ithaka was regularly recited his texts and rhymes for the
daily radio program, Quatro Bairro on the national station, Rádio
Comerical. Ten of the poems offered on the Lost Acapellas release were
written and recorded specifically for the radio program and later (in
mid-1993) were rerecorded as voice-over and musical demos on a visit to
England. These recordings, were missing for 23 years until recently
being discovered in a Los Angeles storage unit on a antiquated cassette
tape.
Among these early acapella poems is So
Get Up, most recently re-popularized by Armin Van Buuren and Cosmic
Gate, which today (twenty-four years and more than a thousand releases
and adaptions later) is considered The Most Remixed Vocal Acapella In
Musical History (by Guinness World Records - 2016, 2017).
Ithaka
first wrote So Get Up in a small cafe in Amoeira near Rádio Comerical
about an hour before going on air with it for his slot on Quatro Bairro,
unfortunately this very first recording has never been recovered. He
did however, as mentioned, record it a second time in the U.K - to
present to radio producers and possibly record companies.
There
working at Rádio Comerical, Ithaka met DJ Vibe (Portugal's most
prominent DJ), who played an hour of progressive house music immediately
following Ithaka's segments. There Vibe usually heard the end of
Ithaka's vocal sequences and was intrigued by the poems. Some months
later, he invited him to participate as a guest vocalist on the first
release by Underground Sound Of Lisbon (a progressive house duo
consisting of Vibe and Rui Da Silva) for Kaos Records.
They
recorded Ithaka's vocal in the early hours of a rainy winter night at
the garage studio, 1 Só Céu, owned by the Portuguese rock band called,
Os Delfins.
Ithaka was told by Kaos (a micro label at
the time) that they would make 200 white-labels vinyls for distribution
within Portugal only. They paid him $70 dollars for his participation,
with a verbal promise to discuss any future distributions and
manufacturing that would possibly follow. And weeks later, from just
that single white-label distribution, the song exploded into an almost
instantaneous national dance floor classic.
Although
open-minded musically, Ithaka was more associated with hip hop, surfing
and contemporary art more than dance music and only infrequently
appeared at the clubs his apocalyptic poem had literally become an
anthem for an entire generation of club goers, inspiring even people who
never liked dance music to get involved.
Ironically,
Kaos Records and Underground Sound Of Lisbon themselves never made a
point of explaining who the mystery prophet was and nobody seemed to
ask, the press included - even though Ithaka was indeed the actual
performer and owned 50% of the publishing.
"I
remember specifically on a couple of occasions trying to get into
Lisbon-area night clubs, which was always a chore because of the wait to
get in, and there in line, two different times during height of the
song's first wave of popularity, I could hear So Get Up playing on the
dance floor...The first was at Frágil in Bairro Alto - and I said to the
snob at the door, hey man, that's me, my voice...let me in. And the
doorman said, if that was you...I would know who you are AND I DON'T! -
And the other time, a few months later, was at ALCÂNTARA, when I again
declared that that was my voice with hundreds of people shouting the
lyrics on top of it muffled behind the thick curtains out the dance
floor..and that doorman said, Yes, my friend, and Elvis is still alive
too!
In late 1994, Ithaka left Portugal for
four months back to Los Angeles for an art exhibit - and during that
short amount of time, Kaos Records had licensed So Get Up, without
consulting him, to several international parties most notably Tribal
Records -USA, a sub-subsidiary of Miles Copeland's I.R.S. Records (EMI).
Although
Rob Di Stefano, the managing director of Tribal Records had met Ithaka
on a previous trip to Portugal, and obviously understood he was from
California and only temporarily residing in Portugal, he realized the
marketing potential of an exotic 100% Portuguese house music product
arriving in the U.S. for the first time and made no attempt to publicize
the vocalist's true origins. No featuring Ithaka credit was ever
included on any of the releases, even though he is both the author and
the vocalist. Yes, this is dance music, but no matter how good or bad
the production is, no one can deny that the vocal-poem and adjoining
hooks are the primal guts of the entire So Get Up experience. How else
could it possibly appeal to such a large musical spectrum of DJs and
producers?
The first 1994 release of So Get
Up on Tribal was a double-vinyl set with ten-mixes, including several
versions by New York superstars Junior Vasquez and Danny Tenaglia. The
early international popularity of So Get Up was undoubtfully manifested
by these interpretations by Vasquez and Tenaglia. Two New York all-stars
creating music around the words of a California hip hop wordsmith. To
call So Get Up, even at that point, a 100% Portuguese release, was
inaccurate at best. The first release by Tribal, which sold upwards of
50,000 copies, also included an uncredited acapella of Ithaka's raw poem
- which paved the way for a vast multitude of remixes and samplings
over a huge cross-section of electronic musical genres.
With
the exception of Stretch & Verne's legally licensed rerecord "Get
Up, Go Insane!" in 1997 (and subsequently Fatboy Slim's remix of that),
every other international release of So Get Up has essentially been
unauthorized. It is fair to say that every (of the more than a thousand
mixes released) house, trance, techno, electro, drum & bass, big
beat, dub step, and art rock versions - under their varying titles of
"So Get Up", "Get Up", "Forget The Past", "the End Of The Earth", "Have A
Blast", "Headcharge", "Hardaventure", etc. have been issued illegally.
No record royalties or performance royalties have ever been paid to the
vocalist/lyricist although all have been made using Ithaka's 1994
recording - made that late night way back when in Cascais, Portugal. By
the most recent estimates of Ithaka's publisher attempting to recoup his
writing shares, So Get Up in it's many incarnations has been either
sold or downloaded more than 30,000,000 times and approximately
250,000,000 have at least heard the poem. Whether payment ever falls
into the right hands, time will only tell.
Ithaka
himself has had an unusual career (and life) to say the least. He came
to recording not thru music itself, but via music photography, visual
arts....and reading books. For nearly three years, among his many other
sporadic occupations, Ithaka was the principal photographer for Priority
Records gangster rap icons, NWA and Eazy E , but that's a story for
another day.
In 1992, attempting to expand his
boundaries outside of the Southern California area, the half-Greek,
Ithaka Darin Pappas, set off soul-searching. He first relocated to
Athens for six months and then spent a year in Tokyo, finally landing in
Lisbon where he spent more than six years.
During this
six-year period in Portugal, Ithaka was hyper-productive. He recorded
So Get Up (and many other poems), made two award-winning hip hop albums,
published translated poems and short stories in Portuguese magazines -
and had several large scale sculpture exhibits of his work. He also
photographically documented much of the early and mid-nineties
Portuguese music scene, shooting record covers for rock, hip hop and EDM
projects.
so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up, so get up,
Twenty years ago today you saw the outside world for the first time.Twenty years ago today you saw your mother and father’s faces for the first time.
Twenty years ago today, you began a life full of sorrow and happiness.
Twenty years ago today you began to hear something other than muffled sounds and the sound of your mother’s heartbeat. You heard yourself cry for the first time ...you heard others cry too.
You heard electronic devices and doors opening and closing and a lot of voices, some melodic, others harsh and ugly.
You have lost and found so much since that day, but do no feel much smarter or wiser than you did then. You feel absolutely childlike, Absolutely childlike, naive without experience.
But ironically, you are completely ready to handle any success or failure the future will bring. Both of which you’ve been avoiding like death itself
No more false expectations. No more lying to yourself. No more waiting for life to begin. No more waiting for things to be perfect, you know they never will be.
