In our electronic music age, it’s sometimes easy to forget how music is basically just a bunch of well-organised noise. It seems like over-produced pop albums have more in common with computer software than performance, so when musicians break the mould, things get interesting.
Musician Daniel Freitag recently teamed up with Ma-Ma, a Hamburg-based creative agency, for Project Bootleg. One part performance art and one part musical score, Project Bootleg involved laying blank records on the floors of various concert venues before big shows like Die Antwort, The Roots, Apparat and Deadmau5. The concert-goers weren’t told about the records beforehand, but during the show, they danced on top of them, leaving scratches on the surface of the vinyl.
As you know, record players read scratches on vinyl as sounds, and Freitag turned those sounds into songs. These songs do not sound like Miley Cyrus. They sound like a mix between experimental and ambient music with a dash of static thrown in. But when you step back and think about it, there’s something very interesting about music that’s literally made of the concert-goers’ dance moves. No twerking allowed. [PSFK]