Just for once, I'm putting up a still image from the promotional video I'm working on.
That blurry thing is a sup-ed up Nissan Silvia hurtling along the stretch at Wakefield Park Racetrack on a miserable rainy day.
As with all these things, Goulburn was in the grips of the worst drought in 90 years. That was until of course Pete and I turned up with a camera to shoot, Of course the drought chooses to break on that very day. Anyway, we managed to get something with which we could go ahead.
CyberBach
Many years ago, a guy going by the name of Josef Sarazen said to me that Bach's music was amazing because it could survive any sort of instrumentation and still be transcendent. In most cases, this is true. If you played Mozart's 'Requiem' on the Xylophone it hardly keeps its dignity, whereas any old Bach Organ work still maintains its vintage Bach dignity and beauty. Don't ask me how this works, but it's a demonstrable phenomenon. Romantic works in particular just don't survive such translations at all - which tells us something about the relationship between timbre and tune.And so, being a conceptual artist of sorts, I decided to see just how far I could push that thesis, given the tools aat my disposal. After all, the likes of Leopold Stokowski, Isao (Does anybody remember 'sound-cloud'?) Tomita and Jacks Loussier, maybe I could have a hack at conceptually molesting the works of the Great One. Don't get me wrong, I love his work; it's just that I have a secret resentment that I'll probably never be able to play his lutenwerks, let alone keyboard works.
So this is the deal: I'm downloading MIDI files, assigning whatever groovy instruments that take my fancy to build up really odd combinations of instruments and mixing and matching musical styles. Others, I'll try to arrange as dance tunes and pop tunes. It's going to be a little 'hooked on classics' in parts, but that can't be helped. Oh yes, there'll certainly be a beat to which you can tap along, too. Is it good music? You bet it is. Is it still Bach? Absolutely. Is it good taste? Who knows? Will it change your view of J.S. Bach? It just might. So far, it certainly has changed mine.
Stay tuned for when I'll post up the results in iCompositions.
2 comments:
Bated breath, most sincerely. I can't wait to see what you are going to cook up. :)
So far I have about 7-8 tracks depending on how one counts these BWV numbers. And GB isn't as flexible as I'd hoped in some ways; and some of these MIDI fles I've downloaded have been pretty idiosyncratic, so getting favorblee results has been difficult. I'm seeing this as a sort of test run for a more serious project in the future, but as with all these things, the likely outcome is that the demo WILL be the final verssion.
All the same, it's something I work on on the side when I'm not doing my corporate video or 'Key psycho'; it's also a lot less work than straining for an original and still getting new music to pop out of the machinie.
Also, I've acquired a taste for working with 'found' sounds, images, objects and music, screwing around with them and publicly available MIDI is a great resource for that sort of application.
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