Digital meets Analog meets Radiohead

A friend of mine recently shared this incredible video (embedded below) by James Houston.

In Houston's words:

I've just graduated from the Glasgow School of Art's graphic design course. This was my final project.

Radiohead held an online contest to remix "Nude" from their album - "In Rainbows" This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that's played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It's pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from "Nude" thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.

Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.

I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

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.

It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to.

I missed the contest deadline, so I'm offering it here for you to enjoy.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX

Houston does much more than just "take the piss a bit" here. He aesthetically expresses one of the contemporary intersections of the digital and the analog. And, while the topic has already been extensively covered, it's worth mentioning that, for example, the resurgence of the popularity of vinyl - analog media - in an age where most music is purchased or otherwise acquired digitally suggests that the line separating the digital and the analog is easily traversed if not increasingly blurred (there's a reason most LPs come with a digital download of the album, and I don't think that it's just to compensate for the difficulty in ripping vinyl into iTunes).

If art expresses the cultural undercurrents of an age, then Houston is clearly onto something...

See for yourself:


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.