For this project I will be working by myself, as I have a few ideas I would like to pursue. I play the drums, or at least I used to when I had a drum kit available. So most of my ideas so far are based heavily on percussion and beats, although I will try to think up some ideas completely unrelated.
Up till Tuesday just gone, I didn’t have any strong ideas, but after Bob’s session, I felt much more inspired. He showed us many artists, the first that I found really interesting was John Cage. He showed us a video of him performing the ‘Water Walk’.
I thought that he was really ahead of his time, pushing the boundary, of even today’s audience, let alone the audience of 1960. I liked his attitude, when the presenter says some of the audience will laugh, John Cage replies ‘I consider laughter preferable to tears’.
Although I don’t want to produce such a experimental track, I do like the way he used a strange mix of everyday objects as instruments.
On a side note, here is a very interesting interview that shows John Cage’s thoughts and ideas on music and sound.
The second artist he brought up the I really liked was Chris Cunningham. He showed us his monkey drummer. I thought that it was excellent how it illustrated the incredibly fast beats, and the complexity of them. You find your self watching the complicated actions of each limb and listening out for there sound.
Chris Cunningham works often with Aphex Twin, aka Richard David James, an electronic music artist. Aphex Twins music I find interesting, some of the elements and techniques he uses I would be interested in using.
The initial idea that sprang to mind was to create some kind of performance of a track, including a story line and performance by a distorted, human like thing.
I then thought it would be cool to make some kind of music yourself. Involving the audience in the performance. I though about making a user interface that allows the user to compose a whole track with pre-recorded beats and rhythm, and be able to add different effects, adjust the tempo, completely change the layout, add brakes and more.
