Intwo

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).

Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

The “band members” are:

• An array of 10 dismantled hard drives act as speakers for vocals & sound effects
• Sinclair ZX Spectrum – Guitars (rhythm & lead)
• HP scanjet 4c – Bass Guitar
• Epson LX-86 Dot Matrix Printer – Drums
• Finlandia TV & Mark-I 9a SLK Oscilloscope – Visual stuff

I admire anyone who can think of a project like this, and actually go through with it. It’s a cool use for old hardware, artistic rather than practical. It must have involved some rather gritty low-level programming, but Houston still pulled it off. The video suggests that the sinclair is controlling the “instruments” with custom software, loaded from a cassette (oh! the old times of Commodore 64s, MSX Spectravideos and other home computer systems). I’d love a description of how it was actually done.

[via NYT|TheMoment]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.