Big Ideas

I really enjoy the music of Radiohead, and I particularly like their new album,
"In Rainbows". Released on October 10, 2007, the band actually gave away the album for free on the Internet for the first few months and still had one of the best selling albums of the year. I could probably write for pages on it's musical and artistic merits. Needless to say, I'm a big fan.

James Houston is too, apparently. The link in the previous sentence is to his "cover" of Radiohead's "Nude" off the aforementioned album. Radiohead held an online contest to see who could remix the tune the best. "Nude" is in 6/8 and quite slow (63 BPM), and presented an interesting challenge to most people. 

The majority changed the time signature to 4/4, sped up the tempo, and awkwardly placed snips from "Nude" over a new drum beat. Thom Yorke, the lead singer and principal composer for Radiohaed, even joked in an interview on NPR that the contest was created to see what kind of entries would turn up, given the unusual nature of the piece in relation to most remixed music, which is in 4/4 and around 120 BPM. 

James Houston wasn't phased, and took the contest in a completely new direction. Instead of trying to remake the song into a dance hit, he was inspired by a line from the lyrics to do something original. In his own words:

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas: Don't get any" I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there. 

The result is truly spectacular. Houston set up an Epson printer, an HP scanner, an array of hard drives, and an old oscillator, which he linked together with a computer. By writing a computer program to operate the devices, Houston was able to organize and orchestrate the tones and timing of the machines such that they would reproduce the song. The scanner plays the bass, the printer the drums, the oscillator the keys/guitar, and, amazingly, the hard drives play the vocals. By spinning the hard drives ever so slightly, a scratching noise is produced as the metallic disc of the drive moves against the sharp, pointy reading needle.

 

The conception and execution of this are really perfect. Not only is it a cool idea, but it sounds great; the tones he was able to produce are completely legitimate and stand alone, independent of the echo of the original song in one's mind.