THE MOUSE THAT REMIXED.(The Talk of the Town)(Danger Mouse's Grey Album)

The d.j. and producer Danger Mouse was born Brian Burton, in White Plains, twenty-six years ago; attended college in the indie-rock hotbed of Athens, Georgia; and then moved to London, where he became part of the underground hip-hop scene. Last year, he teamed up with Jemini, a rapper from Brooklyn, to record the album "Ghetto Pop Life," which was considered one of the most innovative releases of 2003. But, for his follow-up, Burton decided to work with more prominent artists--much more prominent, though also unwitting. Last December, he made an unauthorized remix of "The Black Album," the most recent (and reportedly the final) record by the rap superstar Jay-Z. This is a common hip-hop practice: up-and-coming producers take the vocals from a hot record and reattach them to new backing tracks. Burton's remix sprang from a simple pun: he decided to lay the vocals from "The Black Album" over a musical bed created entirely with samples from the Beatles' "White Album." The result, as any finger-painting kindergartner might guess, was "The Grey Album."

"I had gotten the Jay-Z vocal tracks and wasn't going to do anything with them," he said the other day. "A week or so after that, I was at home in Los Angeles, listening to the Beatles and cleaning up my room. Then it hit me: Oh shit, 'White Album,' 'Black Album' . . . I can probably do this."

Burton spent the next two and a half weeks in his room. "Those were fifteen-hour days, easily," he said. "I played 'The White Album' through four times, listening for anything that I thought I might be able to use, and then I started pulling tiny bits off the album. I was keeping track of the time, because I knew this was a strange kind of experiment, and at one point I saw that I had logged more than two hundred hours."

Part of the challenge of "The Grey Album" lay in matching the tempos of Jay-Z's raps with instrumental passages from the Beatles. "It ...