A couple of months ago, Radiohead released the separated “stems” (vocals, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums) of their single Nude, announcing a remix contest. It is a difficult song to remix at 6/8 timing and 63 bpm, and Tom Yorke + co. apparently had a blast making fun of all the generic 4/4 entries.
James Houston had a bit of a different idea of using the stems, which were available for $.99 each in the iTunes Store. He reconstructed the original song by forcing old printers and hardrives do acoustic tricks and play the stems as an orcestra. Fast forward the clip to about 1:15 for the tune (after the jump).
Building on the work of kinetic installation artists such as Fischli & Weiss and makers of Japanese educational TV show Pitagora Suitchi, ClustaRack advertise their print media stacking product with a witty and slightly unbelievable video of a printshop Ruby Goldberg machine.
Most of you may be familiar with In Rainbows, Radiohead’s latest album. Less of you might be familiar with how they distributed it. The first three months of the album’s availability was accessible via the internet only. Anyone could come to the albums website and download the album for whatever price they saw fit. The band hasn’t released any financial numbers on their profits from the endeavor, but financial success or not, they introduced a new method for mass distribution of music. Until the end of this month, they are experimenting again.
The have separated the song nude into five separate tracks: vocals, guitars, bass, drums, and string. Anybody has access to download these tracks and import them into whatever audio mixing software they have. People then have the ability to upload their remix to a website that users can vote on.
