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Monday Mashup: Mark Twain, Satan … and dance music?

There’s surely no better way to start a dance track than with a quotation from the Devil, right?

 

Lorraine Murphy

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Posted on Dec 10, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 5:52 am CDT

Start your week right with the Daily Dot’s Monday Mashup, the best music remix from around the Web. Turn up your speakers or pop on your headphones, and bring the funk.

“Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you! And you are but a thought.”

There’s surely no better way to start a dance track than with a quotation from Satan, right? It gives the fundamentalists material.

Those memorable words are the opening words of our Monday Mashup, an amazing piece of electronic dance music from British DJ Tut Tut Child, otherwise known as Nick Kingsley. With over 10,000 likes on Facebook in a year, he’s made quite a social media splash, and thanks to Monstercat, the label to which he’s signed, rocking the YouTube, this particular video has racked up 195,500 views despite being basically static.

The quotation is taken from Chapter 11 of Mark Twain’s unfinished book The Mysterious Stranger, and the stranger in question is that most fascinating of angels, Satan. This recording comes from the 1985 Claymation film The Adventures of Mark Twain, where the novel is greatly condensed and adapted, yet still manages to convey Twain’s main themes of the essential malevolence of the universe and how man’s petty nature ultimately dooms him.

If you care to freak yourself out entirely, the Mysterious Stranger segment is on YouTube.

Now to work out those jitters you just gave yourself with today’s mashup, available on Soundcloud as well as YouTube and Spotify. Punctuated with remarks from the Mysterious Stranger, a.k.a. Satan, it’s an almost entirely original composition, but it’s just too good not to feature. The irresistible dance beat, combined with Satan’s fatalistic pronouncements, invites us to dance while the world burns.

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*First Published: Dec 10, 2012, 12:30 pm CST