Wednesday, September 8, 2010

The Great Temptation Of Beyond #629 by Martin Bland's Randomized Control Trials

I'm clearing the decks of a whole lot of versions of these songs from the Randomised Control Trials project.
The concept for these songs was arrived at in September 2002 and finally completed in September 2007.

The premise involved using the "shuffle" program on a group of compact disc players running simultaneously to produce unique arrangements of original music.
All of the pieces followed a few guidelines: the musicians should be recorded separately from one another with little or no idea what the other musicians had played.
They would be given a loose theme to improvise on and a rigid tempo to follow.
These recordings, (sometimes hours long) were transferred on to a computer and cut into short phrases and fragments.
The best of these were selected to be burnt onto cd-r's.
Once all of the music for as piece had been recorded, each instrument was then assigned a cd player of which there were up to six.
The cd players were then played simultaneously with the "shuffle" program activated, thus producing a unique arrangement of the piece each time.
Some of the voices were of a "found" nature but none of the music was sampled from other sources.

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