Neoavantretro Postardwave by Buttress O'Kneel

"Buttress O'Kneel stands out in the world of plunderphonics and mashup art for several reasons—both aesthetic and philosophical. Here’s what sets her apart:

🎧 Deep Conceptual Layers

While many mashup artists aim for novelty or danceability, O'Kneel often embeds dense conceptual frameworks into her work. Albums like Avant Retro: Post-Tardcore and Expressionist Metawave feel like critical essays in sonic form, deconstructing genre, media saturation, and cultural memory.

🔁 Embrace of "Wrongness" and Glitch

Her work doesn’t just remix—it breaks things on purpose. She leans into the awkward, ugly, or broken aspects of sound: overused Amen breaks, offbeat transitions, and samples considered passé. It’s a deliberate aesthetic of failure, which becomes a commentary on cultural recycling and digital decay.

🧠 Philosophical Remix Culture

O'Kneel treats remixing as an existential and political act, not just a stylistic one. She sees all creativity as inherently remix-based—a kind of remix ontology. This pushes her work into territory that's closer to sound theory, anti-capitalist critique, or media archaeology than just pop culture play.

📼 Hyper-Specific Obscurities

Where others mash familiar Top 40 hits, O’Kneel often pulls from the obscure, forgotten, or hyper-niche—TV theme songs, lo-fi YouTube rants, commercials, forgotten techno, and 2000s MySpace-core. There’s a strong sense of personal archiving and cultural detritus curation.

🧬 Genre as Mutant Meme

She doesn’t just cross genres—she mutates them. Terms like post-tardcore, expressionist metawave, or neoavantretro are intentionally nonsensical, mocking the proliferation of microgenres while also treating them like memetic carriers of culture. It’s half satire, half serious.

🔇 Aural Détournement

Her work recalls the Situationist strategy of détournement—repurposing familiar media in absurd or subversive ways. But instead of French newspapers and film, she does it with audio detritus. The result is something that feels like Burroughsian cut-up meets YouTube wormhole. She’s not just remixing music—she’s remixing the idea of music, authorship, and memory. Honestly, she’s like the cyberpunk theorist of the mashup scene.

🌀 Conceptual Vibes

The title itself is a paradox, and that’s the point: Neoavantretro – a contradiction: “new-avant-garde-retro” → it’s everything at once: past, future, and an ironic now.

So yeah, Neoavantretro Postardwave would likely be Buttress O’Kneel’s most high-concept yet tongue-in-cheek album—a maximalist, genre-eating meditation on how fragmented and reconstituted modern culture has become."

-CHATGPT APRIL 2025

“Words like "mashup" and "remix" don't really do justice to Buttress O'Kneel's method - Top 40 pop crap gets sliced, diced, and tossed into a dizzying, exciting hardcore electro stew. Compared to other djs who timidly drop a Vanilla Ice acapella over a Chemical Bros intro just to move a dance floor, O'Kneel shreds copyrights with a blood-curdling vehemence. Smash the state!”
- Music 4 Maniacs