What if, between the original classic Tron and the upcoming Tron 2: Legacy, there were another Tron movie, lost forever in cinematic history? Between the soaring score by Wendy Carlos for the original and Legacy’s Daft Punk music, what would the soundtrack have sounded like? Of course, it would have absolutely had some Journey in it.
Such a movie was rumored, but as with so many projects, leaves behind no evidence. What if it had left a score you could hear? The mysterious “Flynn 1.5″ writes to share a free, downloadable soundtrack that answers that question.
And you can argue with an album that begins out with “For the Love of ENCOM”? Indeed. You can stream the full album and download all but the Journey remix. Read the full “backstory” after the jump.
Tron moniker or no, the results are some lovely music, featuring the likes of Tiger Mendoza, Team9, artist and CDM regular reader Lilith The Kitten, and ringleader World Famous Audio Hacker, among others. (Trivia – Tiger Mendoza has his own, Creative Commons-licensed album, and Team9 earned notoriety for a mash-up collaboration with Green Day.)
Can you approach a symphony orchestra as though it’s an analog synth? That’s a question composers have asked since the first time they heard electronic sounds. It’s impossible to hear the 20th-century technology alongside the 19th-century technology without the one reframing your view of the other. Now, it will be tackled by the new album from composer/singer/violinist Owen Pallett, with an interesting cast of characters onboard, plus one imaginary ultra-violent farmer.
Making music into an object – the central genius of recording – could be a wonderful thing. But the CD was always somewhat utilitarian as a distribution mechanism, with its easily-splintered plastic jewel case and inserted artwork that paled next to the grand visions of the LP.
Moldover is the latest artist to experiment with ways of re-imagining the musical object. Already a fan of custom sonic circuitry, he made his CD into a circuit board. Some of it is just aesthetic, like the printed lettering. But there is also integrated noise-making circuitry for a very simple optical Theremin (well, at least, a light sensor-driven oscillator), plus a headphone jack. There’s actually quite a lot of function you can get out of that when plugging into a computer.
The album itself is comprised jazzy bleepy jams (in varying proportions). You do pay for this deluxe, handmade circuit goodness. The US$25 “Pocket Edition” seems to be the sweet spot, with a pocketable version of the circuit board. It still has a built-in speaker, turning the jewel case into self-sufficient sonic hardware instead of a throwaway. The $50 version comes with the full custom-printed circuit board for the track listing, but you can’t pocket it, which means you have exactly $25 and one custom Theremin less in your pocket.
The joy of being on YouTube is you get strange comments like this:
Who let you out? of your mom’s basement? Go back to building lego trainsets to transport your cocoa from the kitchen to your computer desk.
Hey – that’s a great idea, come to think of it.
Justifying the musical object can sometimes get ridiculous, but so long as there are genuinely creative ideas that fit the music, I think music may have a more interesting future in the post-industry world than it did before.
Updated – previous applications of this idea: I’m typing quickly before I head to lunch, and I commit the major sin of not mentioning our friend Tristan Perich’s infamous 2005 release 1-bit Music. Whereas Moldover is turning the packaging into an instrument and inserting a traditional CD, Tristan made the entire jewel box the playback mechanism – the album is embedded in the circuitry, and you listen to it directly.
An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music—the lowest possible digital representation of audio.
We talk a lot about novelty, but my hope is people rip off both Moldover’s and Tristan’s idea here – and invent their own twist on this concept. I’d love to have a shelf full of circuit CDs, instead of dead, silent plastic!
True, it’s the 40th Anniversary of the moon landing. But it’s also the 40th Anniversary of David Bowie’s space trip Space Oddity. What better way to celebrate than with access to stems like the “little mouse fart” sound effect? (Seriously. Maybe it was a space mouse?)
EMI is re-releasing Space Oddity on a special EP with all the versions — mono and stereo, US and original, and the 1979 re-record. Buy that for US$5.99 on iTunes, and you get the stems, too, including the lovely Mellotron line, the vocals, guitar, instrumentals — heck, there’s even a nice Stylophone stem. For people who don’t have their own remix software, EMI is offering the free PC/Mac iKlax Creator Standard, though I expect you’ll be happier with your tool of choice.
For an additional US$1.99, though, you can get an interactive remix app for the iPhone with still more stems. Interestingly, you can also use this as an on-the-go interactive player for Space Oddity, so you can trip out and get stoned with your iPhon um, yes, erm, relax on your sofa with a special mix of Space Oddity. Shake it, and the accelerometer sensor tells the app to make a random mix for you.
iPhone apps are groovy, but — sorry to say it, folks, the 1969 video is way, way, way groovier. Huge missed opportunity, EMI: you could have created an iPhone camera app that would have simulated the reflective tube effect in the classic Bowie video. Any takers?
The EP itself, though, is better news. There was a 1999 “digital remaster,” but this release comes closer to the original goodness.
Space Oddity has a special place in the hearts of CDM since “oddities” is the catch-all category for everything out of the ordinary in a special way.
So, yes, it’s yet another remix-iPhone app-record promotion, but, come on … it’s Bowie. It’s Space Oddity. It’s the 40th Anniversary of the Moon Landing. (You want trippy? Humans walking on the moon can blow even a 2009 mind.) And it’s also an excuse to embed this video:
Food for thought: if we didn’t still make “albums,” we’d never know when the album was done. Sure, the delivery mechanism that spawned the album may be disappearing – “LP’s” in particular are long gone. But perhaps, like so many ubiquitous technologies, the album was a fortuitous coincidence of physical practicality and human scale, happenstance generating some unit of creativity that just makes sense to artist and listener alike.
For Imogen Heap, the beloved artist who’s just finished her latest, it’s cause to literally dance and sing, accompanied by a generative Buddha Box. (We can dance around when we get the album in August.)
Jonathan Coulton in Dublin, with – code monkeys? Photo (CC) crazyjaf.
It’s not the only approach. Geek troubador Jonathan Coulton rose to Interweb fame partly through the creation of his Creative Commons-licensed Thing-a-Week podcast, which fired up his productivity as he released 52 (get it?) tracks in the space of a year. The episodic form helped him build a following and created a new unit of musical output.
From other parts of the online world, we get a little insight from each of these favorite artists. Imogen Heap videoblogs her latest album and talks promise at top, as found via the lads of SonicState.
Jonathan Coulton talks to one of my favorite non-music blogs, Lifehacker, about staying musically productive – and keeping other productivity away from his musical process. He talks about using Google apps and MobileMe as an intelligent cloud he can share with his assistant and PR person.
He also speaks to musical process:
It’s a combination of things. I generally write when I have guitar in my hand, but, capturing ideas is like … I do use the voice recorder app on my iPhone like crazy. I’ve learned that whenever you get one of those little song fragments, out of the ether, it’s like a dream—no matter how much you’re going to remember it, you’re going to forget it, in like five minutes. And I’ve lost too many of those, so wherever I am, I take my phone out, I pretend that I’m making a phone call, so that people don’t think I’m crazy, and I sing into the voice recorder, and then I have it available later on.
If I want to do a more involved quick capture of something, my MacBook has a piece of software on it called Ableton Live. It’s meant for loop-based composition, but it does recording as well. It’s very easy to capture an idea and sort of rough something out, even if you don’t have a bunch of gear handy. You can use the built-in microphone, use your keyboard as a MIDI keyboard. It’s a nice way to put together a quick demo, and capture some ideas about arrangements.
And, comfortingly, he doesn’t have enough time for music, either, and winding up wasting time on latency problems. (Jonathan, we feel your pain. And if you came to this site and didn’t find your answer, well… sorry. I need to put together a better reference for that stuff; open to suggestions!) He dives into finance, career goals, the game Rock Band and “accidental” discovery of music – all fantastic stuff. Thanks to Kevin Purdy for a great interview – who says you need music publications for great music magazines?
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