Text by Steven Leckart
Photograph by Jerome Gacula

Whether it’s a chubby teen whipping around a homemade lightsaber or Midwestern trailer park kids doing backyard piledrivers, internet video clips are rocking our world. Missed Tom Cruise’s couch dance on Oprah? Just hit up the Internet, where sites like YouTube.com offer a look at seemingly everything. Well, almost everything.

“Every cool video I see gets taken down,” quips turntablist/mixed-media maven Mike Relm, “like the Stephen Colbert thing on C-SPAN. I was like, ‘Hey check this out, man. He really rips on Bush right in front of him! Oh, it’s gone.’ What happened? I thought this was free for the world.”

Putting aside the finer intricacies of copyright law, there are basically two kinds of people: those who believe we should be able to read, view and hear pretty much whatever, whenever – and those who don’t.

It’s not hard to figure out what type Relm is. At 28, the Bay Area native grew up with hip hop, a genre that’s literally built upon the premise that anything goes. Beats are borrowed, hooks are sampled. Everything is reappropriated and reassembled to construct something fresh – as in new, not dope (though the latter is desirable, too).

“It started out with a couple loops,” he explains. “But then people started digging more and using samplers in different ways – and now hip hop is just this crazy monster taking all kinds of different stuff.”

If anyone knows, it’s Relm. Sure, club “VJs” have been splicing videos for more than a few years, but Relm is undoubtedly at the forefront of the next evolutionary phase of hip hop: multimedia. His hour-long sets feature fully integrated clips, meaning the images on screen sync up with the songs. So while he’s mashing up MJ’s “Beat It” with the White Stripes and mixing in N.W.A., Talking Heads or PM Dawn, he’s also running a laptop with Final Cut Pro, handpicking memorable scenes from Office Space and Fight Club and seamlessly weaving it all together.

“I don’t want to say people get lost, but sometimes it’s hard for them to realize what’s going on at first,” he says. “It’s not DJing, or at least I don’t think it’s DJing. There’s more non-DJ gear than DJ gear and I haven’t gotten a request for a song in a long time.”

Relm’s next album, a CD/DVD, is scheduled to drop in the fall. Until then, he’s composing the soundtrack to Turntable Timmy, a cartoon