PÚBLICO - Suplemento Pop-Rock (Quinta-feira 10
Abril 1996)
excerto do artigo, O Americano Feio? por Jorge Dias
O greco-americano Ithaka Darin Pappas participou em "So
Get Up" dos USL e assinou o album, "Flowers And The Color Of
Paint". Estão certamente entre os projectos mais fortes da música de dança
feita em Portugal nos anos 90s. Entretanto, Ithaka viajou pelos Estados Unidos
e o seu nome ficou um pouco esquecido. Até agora quando regressa a Lisboa para
pôr em causa as sua antigas ligações.
Pappas "versus"
USL-Kaos
Ithaka Darin Pappas passou alguns meses em Los Angeles,
cidade de onde é natural e onde fez algums contactos para conseguir um
"manager" e um advogado. "Fui aos Estados Unidos porque havia
uma séria de problemas a resolver aqui. Um deles foi que fiz un disco em 1994
com os Underground Sound of Lisbon [USL] e, quando o gravámos, foi uma coisa
entre amigos, estavamos a fazer arte em conjunto e foi uma coisa boa. Fiz um
acordo verbal com eles segundo o qual receberia 25 mil escudos (approx. 120 €) por mil discos que fossem lançados em Portugal. Nunca se falou de
contratos nem de distribuição no estangeiro."
Desde então, "So Get Up" – que era
originalmente o lado B do maxi que tería por tema principal "Dance With
Me" – fez furor nos Estados Unidos, para onde o disco foi enviado,
transformando os USL, de que fazem parte Rua da Silva (Doctor J) e Tó Pereira
(DJ Vibe), no projecto de "dance music" nacional mais aclamado a
nivel internacional.
"O tema entrou para as 'charts' e foi
lançado em muitos paises, mas eles não reconheceram a minha participação.
Apesar de muitas das remisturas que foram feitas – principalmente as de Danny
Tenaglia e Junior Vasquez, as mais populares- practicamente só reterem as
minhas palavras e a minha voz. Nessa ponto é questionável quem é realmente o
artista. É o Ithaka? Ou são os USL? Quando se 'descartaa a musica original e
faz outra é questionável. É que não sou membro dos USL….?", diz Ithaka. E
acrescento: "Pode perguntar-se a quem se quiser, nos Estados Unidos ou em
Portugal, o que é que indentifica a canção: são as palavras. Neste tipo de
música, que há numeras versões diferentes, a etiqueta são as palavras. A canção
é o poema."
Dai que Ithaka reclame direitos de
interpretação – "royalties", uma vez que os direitos de autor lhe
pertencem por direito – sobre os lucros com "So Get Up". É que o
poema a que Ithaka dá voz no "intro" do tema tinha sido escrito seis
meses antes de ser convidado para juntar-se aos USL, depois de estes o terem
ouvido numa emissão do programa Quatro Bairro, da Rádio Comerical. Segundo
António Cunha, da Kaos, editora dos USL – e depois de o PÚBLICO ter marcada uma
entrevista com Rui da Silva que acabou por não acontecer-, "o que passa é
a velha história de negócio da música: quando as coisas têm sucesso há sempre
alguema tentar aproveitar-se".
Collection
of vocal poems recorded in Europe in 1993, which had been completely
lost until being rediscovered in early 2017 (on a damaged cassette tape
in a Los Angeles garage). These are the companion works for the iconic,
So Get Up.
https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/ithaka2
Californian-born
writer and vocalist Ithaka (aka Ithaka Darin Pappas) relocated from his
native Los Angeles in 1992 to Europe where the artist entered of six
year period of hyper-creativity. There he wrote, vocalized, created
sculptures and photographed among other activities.
In 1993 he
wrote a collection of poems for a daily audio segment he hosted on a
program called Quatro Bairro on Rádio Commercial, Lisbon. After reciting
some these poems live on Rádio Comerical in 1993, he later recorded
them as a collection of demos with a producer friend in the UK.
The
next year he recorded one of these poems, So Get Up, with the
progressive-house project Underground Sound Of Lisbon who achieved
massive international success with the track via distribution by
Tribal/I.R.S. Records in New York.
Between a series of moves and
career developments, the original 1993 vocal poem demos recorded in
England were lost. Neither studio technician or artist could find the
original, or copies.
So Get Up went on to become an international
EDM anthem remixed by greats such as; Miss Kittin, Fatboy
Slim. Mert Yücel, Dave Seaman etc.
Later
in 2013, the song saw yet another chapter of fame when top DJ's both
Hardwell and Armina Van Buuren endorsed a new version of the So Get Up
rleased by German trance music stars Cosmic Gate using Ithaka's original
lyrical/ vocal acapella)
Ithaka himself went on to record a series of critically acclaimed hip hop albums.
Here
together on this disc are two new vocal recordings of Ithaka's iconic
poems "So Get Up" and "We Are The Players" (recorded in Mexico - 2017)
along with the complete collection of vocal-poem acapella demos made in
1993, some with their original proposed instrumental sketches. Please
note: These are not intended to be finished songs, but instead are
included to demonstrate Ithaka's early musical direction prior to both
Underground Sound Of Lisbon's version of So Get Up (1994) and his own
solo album, Flowers And The Color Of Paint (1995).
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 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 invited to recite his texts and rhymes for the daily program,
Quatro Bairro on the national station, Rádio Comerical. Ten of the poems offered
on the Lost Acapellas release were written 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 lost 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).
So
Get Up was originally written and recorded by Ithaka for Quatro Bairro (Rádio Comerical),
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 slots 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
(an EDM 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 the label 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 just weeks later, from just that single white-label pressing, the song
exploded into an almost instantaneous national blockbuster.
Although
open-minded musically, Ithaka was more associated with hip hop and street art 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, 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 owned 50% of the
publishing and was indeed the actual performer.
"I
remember specifically on a couple of occasions trying to get into
Lisbon-area night clubs, which is always a chore, and there in line, two different times, I
could hear So Get Up playing on the dance floor...The first was at Frágil in Bairro Alto - and I said, hey man,
that's me...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..was at Alcatara, when I again declared that
was my voice 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 Stuart Copeland's IRS 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 musucal spectrum of DJ
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 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" have been issued illegally. No record
royalties or
performance royalties have even been paid to the vocalist/lyricist
although all have been made using Ithaka's 1994 recording in Cascais,
Portugal. By the most recent estimates of Ithaka's publisher attempting
to recoup his writing shares, So Get Up 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 boundries outside of the Los Angeles area, the half-Greek, Ithaka Darin Pappas, set off
soul-searching. He first relocated to Athens, Greece 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 also
had several large scale sculpture exhibits. He also photographically
documented much the early and mid-nineties Portuguese music scene,
shooting record covers for rock, hip hop and EDM projects.
In 2013, twenty years after it was first written and recorded, trance legend Armin Van Buuren re-introduced Ithaka's iconic EDM vocal poem So Get Up (The End Of The Earth) to a new generation by playing a version by Cosmic Gate on his popular global A State Of Trance radio program and featuring it on his mix album A State Of Trance 2013 (Armada Records).
Ithaka Darin Pappas: writer vocalist of the apocalyptic, So Get Up
In March of 1993, a demo version of So Get Up was recorded in Manchester, United
Kingdom with producer S. Bradshaw. And later, in February of 1994,
Ithaka was invited to rerecord the poem for the B-Side of the first
vinyl release of Underground Sound Of Lisbon on Kaos Records, Portugal.
It was an almost instant national hit and soon released (along with an
acapella version) internationally by Tribal (USA), a subsidiary of
Stuart Copeland's IRS Records in New York.
Interestingly,
although the poem was written and vocalized by Ithaka a year before ever
meeting Underground Sound Of Lisbon, no public vocal credit was
included on those first releases.
The USL version and the new
remixes by Junior Vazquez and Danny Tenaglia were quite popular
themselves (selling at least 50,000 units) but because an acapella was
included in these major distributions, literally hundreds of new mixes
appeared in just a few years. Many producers simply changed the title
(sometimes not) and put the entire vocal on their own instrumentals and
called it their own.
The vocal acapella has also been released
under the titles; "Get Up", "Get Up Go Insane", "So Get Up Atom Bride",
"The End Of the Earth", "Next Life", "See You In The Next Life",
"Intro", "Headcharge" and "Hardventure"
The vocal itself has
never had a sonic style specifically associated with it, it has kept
changing it's clothes and modernizing itself with the times.
The
spoken-word acapella was originally read on-air on top of an
instrumental version of a Naughty-By-Nature hip hop song, and this UK
demo version is a mid-tempo electro-style track,. The vocal never had a
sonic style specifically associated with it, it has kept changing it's clothes and modernizing itself with the times.
The USL, Tenaglia and Junior Vazquez versions were progressive and tribal house
And
since then have versions have appeared in almost every avenue of global
electronic music such as; Trance, Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Big Beat,
Trip Hop, Tech House, Electronic Art Rock etc.
Groups, producers
and DJs that have released So Get Up inculude; Derek Marin, Peter
Bailey, Pagano, Ben Gold, Eric Kupper, Cosmic Gate, Armin Van Buuren,
Ricardo Diaz, Nixu Zsun, Oxia (France), Mert Yucel (Turkey), Igor Carmo
(Portugal), Miss Kittin (Germay), Public Domain (Holland), Fat Boy Slim
(Norman Cook) UK, Stretch & Verne (UK), Lexington Avenue, Damage
People, Mirabeau, Ma-Beckerfield, FuturePlays (from Mexico), Dj Screw
(Thailand), Djz Rom (Cambodia), Technoboy (Italy), Frankyeffe (Italy),
Maik Ibane, Murt Yucel (Turkey), Mowree (Italy), Razat (Portugal),
Tuneboy (Italy), K-Traxx (Italy), Dylan Hilsley (UK), DJ Vibe, Cee Cee
Lee (Italy), Alex Di Stefano, etc etc etc.
As of 2016, with a
staggering 1129 documented and released mixes, So Get Up is considered
"The Most Remixed Vocal Acapella In Musical History" by the Guinness
World Records.
The EDM vocal masterpeice "So Get Up's true orgins were recently revealed when this 1993 demo was rediscovered.
"SO GET UP" (1993 Demo) - Very rare 1993 demo version of the iconic
electronic dance music vocal-poem "So Get Up". This lyric was
originally written and recorded by Ithaka (aka: Ithaka Darin Pappas) in
January 1993 for a Rádio Comercial Program in Lisbon.
In March
of 1993, this Demo version was recorded in Manchester, United Kingdom
with producer Simon Bradshaw. And later, in February of 1994, Ithaka was
invited to rerecord the poem for the B-Side of the first vinyl release
of Underground Sound Of Lisbon on Kaos Records, Portugal. It was an
almost instant national hit and soon released (along with an acapella
version) internationally by Tribal (USA), a subsidiary of Stuart
Copeland's IRS Records in New York.
Interestingly, although the
poem was written and vocalized by Ithaka a year before ever meeting
Underground Sound Of Lisbon, no public vocal credit was included on
those first releases.
The USL version and the new remixes by
Junior Vazquez and Danny Tenaglia were quite popular themselves (selling
at least 50,000 units) but because an acapella was included in these
major distributions, literally hundreds of new mixes appeared in just a
few years. Many producers simply changed the title (sometimes not) and
put the entire vocal on their own instrumentals and called it their own.
The
vocal acapella has also been released under the titles; "Get Up", "Get
Up Go Insane", "So Get Up Atom Bride", "The End Of the Earth", "Next
Life", "See You In The Next Life", "Intro", "Headcharge" and
"Hardventure"
The vocal itself has never had a sonic style
specifically associated with it, it has kept changing it's clothes and
modernizing itself with the times.
The spoken-word acapella was
originally read on-air on top of an instrumental version of a
Naughty-By-Nature hip hop song, and this UK demo version is a mid-tempo
electro-style track,. The vocal never had a sonic style specifically
associated with it, it has kept changing it's clothes and modernizing itself with the times.
The USL, Tenaglia and Junior Vazquez versions were progressive and tribal house. And
since then have versions have appeared in almost every avenue of global
electronic music such as; Trance, Dubstep, Drum & Bass, Big Beat,
Trip Hop, Tech House, Electronic Art Rock etc.
Groups, producers
and DJs that have released So Get Up inculude; Derek Marin, Peter
Bailey, Pagano, Ben Gold, Eric Kupper, Cosmic Gate, Armin Van Buuren,
Ricardo Diaz, Nixu Zsun, Oxia (France), Mert Yucel (Turkey), Igor Carmo
(Portugal), Miss Kittin (Germay), Public Domain (Holland), Fat Boy Slim
(Norman Cook) UK, Stretch & Verne (UK), Lexington Avenue, Damage
People, Mirabeau, Ma-Beckerfield, FuturePlays (from Mexico), Dj Screw
(Thailand), Djz Rom (Cambodia), Technoboy (Italy), Frankyeffe (Italy),
Maik Ibane, Murt Yucel (Turkey), Mowree (Italy), Razat (Portugal),
Tuneboy (Italy), K-Traxx (Italy), Dylan Hilsley (UK), DJ Vibe, Cee Cee
Lee (Italy), Alex Di Stefano, etc etc etc.
As of 2016, with a
staggering 1129 documented and released mixes, So Get Up is considered
"The Most Remixed Vocal Acapella In Musical History" by the Guinness
World Records.
An incomplete list of DJ/producers who have remixed, reworked, covered
or sampled the vocal poem "So Get Up" by Ithaka Darin Pappas since its
first recording in 1993 include: Cosmic Gate (Germany), Danny Tenaglia (USA), Junior Vazquez (USA), DJ Vibe (Portugal), Mert Yücel (Turkey), Eric Kupper (USA), Fatboy Slim (UK) and Miss Kittin (France), Pelarli,
Alex Di Stefano, Public Domain (Holland), Pagano (Italy), Mirabeau
(UK), Damaged People (UK), Mowree (Italy), Stretch & Verne (UK),
Sarasite, Orion's Voice, Bob Ray & Van Dyuk, Igor Carmo, JJ Mullor,
Dani Sber, Swing Kings, Atlantis IT, Ben Gold, Nixu Zsun (France),
Ricardo Diaz, Peter Bailey (USA), DJ Kingsize, FuturePlays (Mexico),
Derek Marin, Oxia (France), Domino, DJ Diego Mendonça, Mauro Ferno,
Maik Ibane, Ce Ce Lee (Italy), Dj Kryst-Off Aka Zornéus (France), FRANKYEFFE (Italy), Branko & Club Atlas (members of Buraka Som Sistema), Alex Page (Portugal), Nell Silva (Portugal), Alex Farolfi, Fargetta, GianLuca Mens, The Ventura 87, Dimas Carbajo, Christo Z
(Greece), Ronni King,Terry Lee Brown JR., DJ Theo V (Greece), Djz Rom
(Cambodia), DJ Beg, Lexicon Avenue, DJ Screw (Thailand) etc etc.
Labels that have released "So Get Up" mixes include: Tribal (USA-UK),
Twisted (USA-UK), Forensic, Kaos (Portugal), Plastic City, Bosphorus
Underground Recording (Turkey)
