My own President Obama is this week off making his pitch for why Chicago should host the Olympic Games. Correction. Oops. I need to read the news. Chicago was eliminated first. But look out – our friends at Antipop (slogan: “antipop music for a pop music”) are using a different tool in their arsenal: music.
Watch the video for some fun gear spotting, plus one vintage arcade cabinet. I could point out stuff I see, but that’d spoil the fun. Shout out in comments.
There’s definitely a commercial gloss on this, but it’s nicely executed, and felt so absurdly Olympic to me that I actually couldn’t help but smile listening. (In fairness, either Chicago or Madrid ought to be able to do better than New York did with 2012; I recall dignitaries in traffic while rowers paced the polluter waters of Flushing Meadows. Yipes.)
Here you go, probably the most commercial music we’ll ever run on CDM:
Makes me want to, like, train or something.
Updated: From comments, I like these alternative suggestions by safd in place of “anti” pop:
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.
In a Hollywood overrun with remakes, a new Tron has quite a daunting challenge. The original film may be a cult hit for its 80s arcade cool, but it also was a seminal moment in the evolution of computer animation, at the nexus of obsessive-compulsive optical effects that came before and digital effects that came after. (Google Perlin Noise, if you must.) But where the bits of the effects look uneven or dated alongside the brilliant, it’s nearly impossible to top the genius of Wendy Carlos’ score. Her deft blend of choirs, orchestras, organs, and rich electronics wasn’t just forward looking: it’s fresh today, an alternative to some of the signature sameness in today’s games and films.
Perhaps Tron Legacy will do what other belated sequels have not: express love for the original. With Daft Punk helming the score and a reverent, inspired crew ready to make Tron live again, the trailer last week was the real sleeper hit of Comic-Con.
If that’s not enough layers of fandom, though, head to GearSlutz for a lesson in film scoring and a recreation of the trailer in Reason, custom Reaktor patches, and Ableton Live. This is not much of an infomercial for Live: because Ableton’s arrange view doesn’t quite understand frames, scoring with Live is a bit of a beast. (Live 9, anyone?) But it’s a great example of love for the movie and its original score. And hey, everyone need a source of joy, even a film.
Stripped the original audio and redid all of the sound from scratch using Reason/NI Reaktor/Ableton Live 8. An M-Audio Axiom 49 was used to perform the Lightcycle Engine Oscillations
Wendy Carlos, if you’re out there, we get it. You revolutionized film scoring and electronic orchestration, and we’re all in your debt. It’s not so much that you switched on Bach or switched on Moog or even switched on Kubrick and guys in glowing skin-tight outfits. You switched on sound, and nothing has been quite the same since.
Now, we just have to hope 2010 can show us a good time, too.
Miguel Isaza has created a must-read new blog for anyone interested in sound design, and much to our delight has put it on noisepages. He’s being incredibly prolific with posts, covering creative projects to get your ideas flowing, terrific overviews of leading people in the field with links to interviews and resources for learning about their work, and tons of links for learning your craft technologically and artistically.
Naturally, Pixar figures prominently, with some of the best sound design on the silver screen in recent years. I’m looking forward to finally seeing UP; Michael Coleman offers the video above. See Miguel’s site for more links and interviews and an overview of the all-star team that did sound for Pixar’s latest.
Thanks for this great resource, Miguel; I’ll certainly be reading daily.
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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