What is Black Midi? An Introduction To The Strange Remix Art

I was recently watching videos on this newish youtube channel called “This Exists”. You can kind of figure out what the channel is about just from the title. They talk about little known subjects that appear outrageous but are real. This Exists posted an episode about a little thing called Black Midi. Now of course me having a blog that is dedicated to everything midi related, I was really interested.

What is Black Midi?

Black midi works just like normal MIDI. The only difference is that Black MIDI has 100,000+ midi notes in a single song!

A person who makes black midi is called a “blacker”. So why would anyone want to do this? It all began around 2009 when Black Midi started to gain popularity.

A youtuber with the name of kakakakaito1998 posted his first black MIDI composition on YouTube. This  video quickly gained popularity (Video shown below). People were fascinated by the crazy sounding music and the psychedelic display of thousands of MIDI notes flying through the piano roll.

So… Is this a new genre of music?

While this strange music appears like a genre of it’s own, according to TheTrustedComputer, a well respected blacker, “It actually falls under a remix category, rather than a genre of electronic music.” While there are blackers who make original music, most of them do remixes. Search almost any popular song’s black midi remix and you should find one.

Here is a black midi remix of ‘Sandstorm’ by Darude

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