Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Random Acts of Art #2 - Beck

I don't mean to tell you what art is or even what is artistic. I only plan on showing you a few of my inspirations, some may not technically even be "art." Many of them won't be considered art by everyone, however, I share these things for a few reasons, not all of which I'll explain.

Art can inspire, connect, and enlighten.

Let's continue:

Sound and Vision

If you've followed me or my blog for any decent amount of time you'll already know that I'm a huge Beck fan. Beck is coming to Detroit for the first time in nine years, so in celebration, my next Random Acts of Art post is about The Beck. I have a pretty major list of things that I would consider artistic that involved Beck, but I'm hoping to narrow down a few of them into this one blog post and have him be involved a little less in the other posts.

Beck's cover/reimagining of David Bowie's Sound and Vision is an incredibly ambitious project. I would have loved to be around for the development of this concept. Before I fall into a terrible tangent of how insanely creative Beck is, I think I'll just let you watch what I'm talking about. This performance includes over 160 musicians of all kinds (including a yodeler.) It also features a stage ...or an audience...that spins so that you are constantly moving through the music. They recorded the entire thing with some microphones and video cameras that were set up specifically for this performance so that you can go online and actually hear how the song would have sounded from each seat in the auditorium, you can even use your webcam to move your head and the sound moves with it! I'm told you should listen to it in headphones to get the full sound. Anyway, here's the video:



Also, here's a very quick Behind the Scenes that shows the rotating stages and the camera set-ups:



Shortly after that Beck went an entirely different route by releasing an album of sheet music. None of the songs had been recorded and each song was a sort of "bare bones" take so that people could inject their own personality into the music and really make it their own.

These are the sort of ideas that I love; taking things from the past and adjusting them for the present, helping people see something normal in a different way, bringing people into the experience as an active participant. The past holds so many ideas and actions that can be very beautiful in our "hands-free" society. For those that are looking for a playlist for their day, here's my ever changing playlist of the songs from Beck's "Song Reader" sheet music album:



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