During the early days of August, 2009, as the Central Park trees began to fade, the grass became damp, and a melancholic combination of summer and autumn commenced, New York University graduate student Brian Kecskemety sat before his MacBook. He was fiddling with Logic Studio, an Apple music production program nearly labyrinthine in its complex manipulations of sound.

Kecskemety had decided, on a whim, to revisit some recordings he had collected as an undergraduate audio production major at Ohio University. His professor at the time, music engineer Eddie Ashworth, had given his students the original session tapes to Sublime’s popular single “What I Got” in the form of audio files that separated the bass, vocals, drums, and any other components of the song (Ashworth had been the sound engineer for the single).

Kecskemety’s original assignment involved a simple mixing of the song, but, this time, he tried something different. Using Logic Studio — the various blues, greens, and grays of the program’s interface resembling a glossy cupcake — Kecskemety took only the vocals of “What I Got” and placed them on top of a custom musical backdrop composed of two songs by contemporary rapper M.I.A.: “Paper Planes” and “Mango Pickle Down River”. Kecskemety worked on the project for roughly three hours, also adding an introduction to the new Sublime/M.I.A. mash involving rap group Outkast, ‘90s punk outfit The Offspring, the legendary rap group Public Enemy, and the Mos Def/Talib Kweli combo Black Star.

Later that day, Kecskemety played his multi-song amalgam, or “mashup”, for Brad Bambara, an old friend from high school who was also living in New York at the time. Bambara was captivated by the concept, immediately realizing that both he and Kecskemety had the time and resources to pursue — and complete — a true musical vision. They decided to pursue this project, this “mashup”, and see how it developed, mashing both their musical tastes and talents in the process.

Born in Rochester, NY within a day of one another in 1988, Bambara (May 11) and Kecskemety (May 10) attended Pittsford Sutherland High School. Their friendship prospered around a general love for music and performing.

Kecskemety played piano, clarinet, and guitar while growing up and participated in chorus and musicals throughout high school. Inspired by the experiments of a classmate, he even tried his hand — haphazardly — at mashups. For his part, Bambara played guitar in an alternative rock group called Euphoria, a group that remained together up to the members’ early college years.

Kecskemety was a big fan of the group, not only attending as many shows as he could (including the group’s first-ever performance), but even using his burgeoning skills in audio production to mix the group’s first and only album after their freshman year in college.

Ironically, throughout their high school friendship and brief musical collaboration, Bambara never had the faintest inclination that he would eventually work with Kecskemety, especially not so closely, on a music project. Or that it would be a mashup album, of all things.

After Kecskemety played his mashup for Bambara, the newly created musical duo began adding to the concept on weekends, as Kecskemety’s NYU studies took up most of his free time and Bambara, a game-design major at the Rochester Institute of Technology, spent his weekdays interning at Freeverse, a design company specializing in games and applications for the Apple iPhone.

The two worked deliberately, slowly, huddled around Kecskemety’s MacBook and combining more songs of disparate genres until the project’s potential began to consume their waking thoughts. They became increasingly reliant on text-messaging, passing ideas back and forth for new mashings. Kecskemety recalled how he was riding the subway one day when, suddenly, the songs “Ziggy Stardust” by David Bowie and “Sweetest Girl” by Wyclef Jean coalesced in his mind, showing him a great combination. Kecskemety quickly texted Bambara as he exited the subway so he would not forget.

Bambara had a similar moment while he casually listened to “Bicycle Race” by Queen. Suddenly, the thought occurred to him that “LoveGame,” a recent hit from pop darling Lady Gaga, would mix well rhythmically and tonally with “Bicycle Race”. Bambara texted Kecskemety with the idea, and Kecskemety expanded on Bambara’s initial idea in a way he had never considered, ultimately producing a segment that included alternative groups the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Muse, and even rap group N.W.A.

This pattern continued, with Bambara and Kecskemety working on weekends and bouncing ideas off one another in a strictly professional, courteous way that bared no resemblance to the overwrought, dramatic creative sessions that stereotypically characterize a creative partnership.

“No drama or any of that stuff,” Bambara said, to which Kecskemety succinctly responded, “Nope.”

The necessity of both members’ contributions became ever more clear, whether it came in the form of suggestions for transitions, new effects, or artists one partner had not previously considered. Such is the glory of teamwork, though, as Kecskemety explained: “There’s no way we could’ve done this on our own … We had days that were more frustrating than others, (but) every time Brad would talk about it, I would get, like, more motivated to do something with it and work on it.”

As the duo’s little sampling project evolved into a massive tapestry, two things became clear to Kecskemety and Bambara. First, they were creating something far beyond a “pet project,” as Bambara put it, and were now in the midst of a sprawling, ambitious effort that could very well become a full-length LP.

Second, they had to be clever — even cheeky — to find the right material for the album. Because they lacked the original sessions for most of their desired artists (sans the aforementioned Sublime recording), they instead engaged in mass Internet scavenger hunts, scouring various Web sites and Internet communities (one site, Jamglue, was particularly useful) for instrumental and vocal-only versions of tracks. And if they were unable to find the instrumental versions, they then had to carefully edit instead.

“You mentioned ‘The Lion King’,” Bambara said to me, alluding to an earlier moment in my interview with the duo when I cited one of their particularly creative mashups involving Snoop Dogg rapping with a chorus from “The Lion King” anthem “I Just Can’t Wait to be King”. “We didn’t have a special version of that song, just the one that everyone else has access to. (We) just (did) some careful manipulations.”

That last example of the duo’s sampling, where the streetwise gangsta rhymes of Snoop Dogg are juxtaposed with the sugar-sweet sounds of Disney, could be among the more appropriate examples of what Bambara and Kecskemety — if not the entire mashup genre — seeks to accomplish: an unexpected twist of the musical vernacular, an act of sampling that simultaneously respects the original artist’s vision while redefining it for a new audience.

When Snoop Dogg rhymes with beats by rap producer Dr. Dre, he sounds lethargically menacing, his lazy drawl casually describing the horrors of the streets; yet, when Snoop raps with the bouncy melodies of a Disney tune, there’s a tenderness, even an innocence to his delivery, a characteristic that would have been unimaginable on “The Chronic”, a classic Dr. Dre album on which Snoop Dogg rapped.

Or, continuing in the vein of hip hop, consider an earlier sample on the album, where the duo mash Eminem’s rapping on “Lose Yourself” with the lead melody from Nine Inch Nails’ industrial masterwork “Closer.” All of the sudden, there is a new edge to Eminem’s rapping, an attitude bordering on recklessness when coupled with the intensity of the Nine Inch Nails production. Therefore, the mashup, by way of juxtaposition, reveals new depths and unimaginable facets of an artist’s work.

As Bambara told me, “Mashes like this do a service to the originals. (We are) offering the songs most people are familiar with but in a new context.”

“Do you see any merit in Andy Warhol’s work?” He later asked, rhetorically answering one of my questions with a question. “What’s cool about taking a Campbell’s Soup can and drawing it a bunch of times? He just stole someone else’s shit and reused it. Or is that not what it’s really about?”

“The album didn’t exist before we made it,” Kecskemety said. “Now it does.”

“Well,” Bambara said with a good-natured chuckle, as he went to complement Kecskemety’s comment. “I think it was T.S. Eliot (who) said, ‘Good poets borrow, great poets steal.’” — Bambara here was alluding to a literary essay by Eliot on the playwright Philip Massinger where he stated: “A poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” But Bambara continued — “We’re clearly embracing the fact that our source material comes from somewhere else … Are we the greatest artists of all time? No, but we’ve (definitely) created something.”

Kecskemety added, in a fine touch of irony, that while he and Bambara constructed their album, he was studying the concept of “fair use” in one of his NYU classes, the notion that allows artists to borrow the content of other artists.

According to one of the doctrines of fair use, a song can be sampled without the owner’s permission as long as the final product — the song that the sample is being used for — contains what the Supreme Court called “transformative value”, meaning, naturally, a new quality or feeling completely foreign to that of the original song.

The modern notion of fair use, in many ways, originated in the infamous Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., when Luther Campbell of the hip hop group 2 Live Crew was sued by Acuff for using the main guitar riff and melody of Roy Orbison’s hit song “Oh, Pretty Woman” without Acuff’s permission. The Supreme Court ruled that Campbell’s version, simply titled “Pretty Woman”, existed purely as parody, and as such the song featured sufficient transformative value and was a fair use (this is how Weird Al Yankovic gets way with parodying so many songs).

Beyond the core tenets of the music, though, what is striking about the Kecskemety/Bambara duo was how their very partnership was as much a mashup as Nine Inch Nails and Eminem. It became clear — through the straightforward diction in the men’s language, the selfless compliments to one another’s talents, the kind, laid-back personalities that nonetheless demonstrated distinct drive, creating a strange presence of comforting intensity — that it was specifically the normal backgrounds of both Kecskemety and Bambara that made their musical experiments such a success, meaning, the way that two passionate, albeit entirely ordinary guys could combine to create an ambitious mashup album with 188 individual samples.

Simply, “Now Hear This”, the name Kecskemety and Bambara ultimately chose for the album, would not exist with any other duo, for a different duo composed of different people would mashup in new, unpredictable ways.

Kecskemety and Bambara finished the major work on the album by Thanksgiving, shortly after they settled on a name for their partnership. While they worked on the album, the duo brainstormed possible names, running the gamut of band names many times over. “We tried a million,” Bambara said. Finally, after much debate, they settled on The Stereo Bomb, simply because it was the best name they came up with.

Kecskemety then took over the brunt of the album work by finalizing it with the various mixing techniques available on Logic Studio while Bambara designed a Web site to launch the album for a free download (the album is still free today). Even in these final stages, with the album nearing completion, both Kecskemety and Bambara wondered how the album would be received and if any of their efforts would pay off.

But now, with the album a hit among the Ohio University and New York University crowds and slowly expanding to other arenas, both admit feeling that all their hard work and efforts have been validated. Indeed, the duo’s Facebook page currently lists 513 fans (one of whom described the album as “absurdly amazing”), their Web site amounted more than 2,800 hits in its first two weeks, and the album’s download base has extended to both YouTube and last.fm.

About a week after my first learning of The Stereo Bomb, I sat down for a chat with John Dees, the Ohio University student who introduced me to the duo. I asked him why he felt so motivated to show me the album.

“It’s awesome,” Dees said, his round face, unkempt shag of a head, and high voice concise almost to the point of parody. I wanted something more concrete.

“But what about it is awesome,” I asked, hoping for more elaboration.

“The flow…is great,” he said with his neck craned, his eyes pointed at the ceiling, and his tone coated with a dreamy sense of admiration.

I asked for further clarification, but Dees then looked at me, blankly, his expression clearly exuding one key phrase: “It’s art, dude. Just accept it.”