A few weeks ago i featured some videos describing ambitious and ridiculous road projects, fictional and real. In the futuristic video– which featured some gems: like heated roadways and punchcard voting system for cars– there images of elevators taking cars to within a few feet of their high-rise office desks.
Someone in NYC decided now was future enough and built that building, but this one is for housing people not corporations. 200 Eleventh Avenue is a construction project in NYC’s Chelsea neighborhood that puts a floor level garage attached to each apartment and reachable by elevator.
Fun stuff for those with at least 7 figures in their housing budgets.
This video provides a wonderful description of an early sampling based instrument. Every sound was recorded on a tape track and played in sync with the other track. The keys appear to control the tape heads. The instrument has since appeared on an impressive list of popular recordings for such a novel instrument.
Yes, what you see in this video is a violin, viola, cello, and bass glued together. It was created by Diego Stocco(twitter) and is featured in Guy Richie’s film Sherlock Holmes.
Enjoy.
Nothing directly related to music, but I think these road works projects are cool.
The Millau Viaduct was opened in 2004 and completed the A75 route across France.
It’s big. Flickr is nice to this bridge.
In the 1950s, Disney produced several videos offering people glimpses at futuristic wonders that may one day be part of everyday life. Many of these predictions are fantastic and outrageous, but explain some insight into the reasoning behind many of our contemporary highway faux-pas(wired.com: ten highways to raze now).
Writer for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, muses on possible explanations why John Cage is still held in such disdain while so many of his contemporaries like Rauschenberg and Pollock are hailed as visionaries.
Perhaps the answer to his question rests in the nature of aleatoric music itself. Although Cage did experiment with other techniques, he is best known for his forays into chance. Despite its conceptual edginess, the musical performances, like much of our extraneous sensory stimuli, failed to make any profound or evocative statement.
But unlike the painters Ross compared Cage’s work to, the performances of Cage’s alleatoric music produced no enduring artifact. They are ephemeral, existing in the concert hall but making no lasting mark on those who share in the work. Which was perhaps Cage’s original intention.
“I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.” –John Cage
