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My Great Ghost, "Glass Machine"—remixing Philip Glass, with an app

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 17:34:58 +0000

Scott Snibbe, the developer for Björk’s "Biophilia" app, has developed an iOS app for the Philip Glass remix project—the app is titled REWORK_.

Here is a video of My Great Ghost, whose remix of "Music in 12 Parts" is the first track on the record, performing an entirely new track using the app.

More about the app:

The studio has built a REWORK app that includes interactive visualizations corresponding to 11 of the remix songs with visuals that range from futuristic three-dimensional landscapes to shattered multicolored crystals and vibrating sound waves. The app also includes an interactive “Glass Machine” that allows users to create their own music inspired by Philip Glass’ early works by simply sliding two discs around side-by-side, generating polyrhythmic counterpoints between the two melodies.
“This is a way for people who don’t have the experience of manipulating music material to see what it's like,” says Glass.
The app is available via the iTunes store here and more info can be found at the Snibbe Studio website here.

And for those in the NYC area: My Great Ghost is playing at the Studio at Webster Hall on Monday 1/21.

Carl Sagan's Cosmos: The Meat Planet (with pork volcano)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 13:46:11 +0000

"A giant planet with a liquid interior full of liquid beef and pork, into which a thousand earths would fit."

Darren Cullen of Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives and friend Mark Tolson edited together this 'lost episode' of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, about a fabled Meat Planet, with details of its famous pork volcano, Mount Sustenance, "well-known to astronomers since the time of Galileo."

If NASA would focus on the important planets, the delicious bacon-y ones like this, perhaps we'd have a real future in space exploration. Astronomy-gastronomy!

Video: Chris Brown+Rihanna's "Birthday Cake" remixed with lyrics from police report for 2009 beating

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 23:33:53 +0000

[Video Link: "Birthday Cake in the Face."]

A quickie remix parody of "Birthday Cake" by Rihanna ft. Chris Brown. Lyrics quoted directly from the police report (PDF). What is this about? Created by Andrea James and Calpernia Addams. Here's a related analysis that's worth a read.

Evil computer just wants to be friends

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:58:22 +0000

In the tradition of The Shining re-cut to look like an uplifting comedy, comes this music video, which repurposes scenes from several movies—most prominently 2001: A Space Odyssey—to tell the story of a misunderstood computer that accidentally hurts the ones it loves.

The song is "Limited" by Jascha. The video was created by my friend John Pavlus (who has also made some cool films about entropy and the Antikythera Mechanism). He says:

It seemed like a fun challenge to take images that have acquired so much "baggage" over the years — like the glowering cyclops eye of HAL from 2001, which has become visual shorthand for "evil machine" — and try to attach completely opposite emotional associations to them. What if something like HAL wasn't evil at all, but just misunderstood in its intentions, like a puppy who plays too rough with its owner? That's exactly the image that Jascha's plaintive refrain in "Limited" put into my head. Remixing material from five very different films creates a necessarily impressionistic approach to telling a story, so maybe the story this video tells in your head isn't the same one that it tells in mine. Either way I hope it's a good one.

Video Link

Nyan Cat orchestra: composer creates classical music variations on a meme theme

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:54:42 +0000

[Video Link].

Craig Davis Pinson, a composer who is a Boston Conservatory student, writes in the liner notes for the video embedded above:

This is a set of variations written on the melody heard in the Youtube video Nyan Cat. It is an experiment, in which I tried to find the limits of how far I could transform the melody before it begins losing its identity. The theme is known as Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya!, originally posted by username daniwellP on the Japanese video sharing website, Nico Nico Douga. The Nyan Cat phenomenom has become ingrained in popular culture, and amazes me both in its sheer absurdity and its freakishly colossal popularity. However, fascinating as they are to me, the origins of the theme are not played upon in this composition. Instead, I treated Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! as pure musical material from which to generate music. The motivation to use this theme came from my repeated viewings of the video, and slowly realizing that it is a strangely alluring melody. Therefore, this is my tribute to Nyan Cat. Credit goes to daniwell-p for creating this theme, prguitarman for creating the gif animation, and saraj00n for joining them. Theme used for non-commercial purposes as per daniwell-P's request.
On a large scale, the work is structured along a simple alternation pattern. The theme and its variations alternate, similarly to rondo form. However, the theme is progressively dissolved, meaning that each time it returns it contains less percentage of the source material. This chipping-away continues until there's nothing recognizable left. In the variation episodes, more tools are employed to change the essence of the theme, especially, pronounced changes of duration, texture, harmonic character, and of the intervallic makeup of the melody. Each of the variations has its own defined character, and they contrast sharply with one another in mood and technique. Despite of the contrast of its sections, the piece exploits a long-scale narrative arc, playing on the contrast between the theme's duration - which remains essentially consistent at each iteration - and the durations of the variation episodes, which seem to grow out of control as their proportions become subverted.

This is a recording of the Juventas Ensemble performing the premiere of the work, on the Composer Recital Series 12, February 9, 2012 at Seully Hall in The Boston Conservatory. Many thanks go to this amazing ensemble for valiantly performing a very demanding score! I really appreciate it!!  
Juventas New Music Ensemble:
Lidiya Yankovskaya, Conductor
Zach Jay, Flute
Marguerite Levin, Clarinet
Julia Scott Carey, Piano
Yohanan Chendler, Violin
Drew Ricciardi, Viola
Rachel Arnold, Cello

(thanks, @parches!)

Every opening of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 01:45:38 +0000

[Video Link]. YouTube viewer comment: "I liked the part where they played the opening chords of the symphony."

(thanks, Joe Sabia!)

Comet Lovejoy + Total Recall = awesome

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:13:43 +0000

Further evidence that the ability to remix scientific videos and images is awesome: Here's NASA's footage of the International Space Station rounding planet Earth to catch a glimpse of the comet Lovejoy, set to a piece of Jerry Goldsmith's score for the movie Total Recall. The result is breathtaking. Real life > than special effects.

Thank you, Avi Solomon!

Video Link

Smash TV's Skinemax

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:32:55 +0000

Skinemax, described as "Koyaanisqatsi for a generation raised on late night television and B-movie VHS tapes," stars Kurt Russell. [Video Link]

Android Dreams: Time-lapse Tokyo Homage to Blade Runner

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:07:04 +0000

[Video Link]. Boing Boing reader Samuel Cockedey created this lovely short, and explains:

This is a tribute to Ridley Scott and Vangelis, whose work on Blade Runner has been a huge source of inspiration in my shooting time lapses. Please watch in HD with sound on! Shot over a year in Tokyo with a Canon 5dmk2, mainly in the Shinjuku area. Music: "Main Titles" and "Blush Response" from the Blade Runner soundtrack. More information on the process here. Selected sequences available for licensing here.

Escher/Portal remix

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 01:01:36 +0000

Here's a nice gallery of video-game-themed fine art remixes, including this curiously appropriate Escher/Portal remix.

(via JWZ)

Fine Arts [imgur.com]