James Taylor's experimental glitchtronica at Obama's inauguration David Pescovitz at 10:06 am Tue, Jan 22, 2013

• [Nell Anvoid]

  I like it.

  • [ZikZak]

    I like to think Hendrix would too.

• [Rob Coon]

  First time I’ve enjoyed James Taylor.

  • [ChickieD]

    I saw him live – was on a date, figured hey, I like his music fine, right? It’s always worth it to see an experienced musician perform live, right? That was just the most terrible concert I ever went to. One of his songs every so often, fine. But he just sat on a stool, strumming, singing his oh so mellow music, and I nearly fell asleep. Now I hate him with a passion. 

    • [Kevin Pierce]

      Some artists are better in small doses.

• [Changasyncadango Robotnik Terh]

  I hear he was being remixed live by Markus Popp.

• [A Cooper Reid]

  how does this happen – i would like to try and recreate it for some of my music projects

  • [Derek C. F. Pegritz]

    This kind of signal degradation is difficult to reproduce in a studio setting without really screwing around with your expensive equipment in ways that no one with any sense would ever DARE–but there are a number of plugins and effects that can get your sound *really* close! IZotope’s Stutter Edit is pretty good, as is dblue’s Glitch…but even a simple bitcrusher can be tweaked to do the same if you automate the bitrate so it goes up and down. Depending on the bitcrusher, you can automate its other parameters too to create audio dropouts and digital-degradation crackle. You know what sounds *totally* cool? Adding a noise gate after the bitcrusher so that it only lets through crackles and pops above a certain dB threshold–that *really* makes things sound all gritty and damaged!

    Or you could do what Richard D. James of Aphex Twin once did: spill a can of Coke into a hardware synth and just see what it sounds like!

• [jimbuck]

  Bleeding Edge since he remixed “Sweet Baby James” from a nice lullaby to rave favorite.

• [pizzicato]

  wouldn’t happen if it was ANALOG!!

• [EH]

  The best inaugural technical operations the 21st century has to offer. In other words: FU little people.

• [euansmith]

  Yet another artist fecking about with autotuner! :(

  • [proginoskes]

    Sounds to me more like a digital stream going through a channel with erratic latency and/or huge packet loss. RealPlayer used to get pieces of sounds just barely through sometimes but played with the wrong pitch. I’ve heard Skype sometimes gets messed up so that it gets stuck with the entire stream being played back with the wrong pitch for minutes at a time.

    • [euansmith]

      Sorry, I was joking; still, thanks for the technical explanation.

• [Bill McGuire]

  He has been doing a lot of interviews lately about his love of Aphex Twin and Autechre.

• [Derek C. F. Pegritz]

  SWEET. James Taylor is the next Otto von Schirach!

  • [Once Dead Flesh]

    Fire and satanic unicorn orgies would be a fantastic mashup.

• [ImmutableMichael]

  I’m glad I saw this after “Do you know anything about techno”. Almost a musical unicorn chaser.

• [mikei]

  I knew Obama and his Godless Liberal Communist ilk were attempting to deconstruct America, but I didn’t realize until now that it’s all one big elaborate art project. Talk about subversive.

• [ohbejoyful]

  That’s a shame; it came thru fine on the broadcast (I think I was watching CNN).

• [tomwood]

  We were there, at the Washington Monument section. A large section of the inauguration sounded like that. To re-create, maybe hire the company in charge?

• [irksome]

  I didn’t know James Blake played at the Inauguration…

• [Drake White]

  Funny … he was on Charlie Rose talking about performing this and they both joked about “what could go wrong?”

• [Pippa Hinchliffe]

  I’m sure James Taylor himself will top any comment any of you have made on here, as he’s famous for not taking himself too seriously!