Post for: #music (17 Posts)

We've been hooked on Loops.

The Starter Set comes with an electronic base "stage" and a "band" - a collection of five small characters, each with its own sound, rhythm, and style. When you place them on the stage, they start to play together automatically. No matter what mix you try, it always sounds surprisingly good. It feels like magic, instantly musical and endlessly creative.

You don't need instructions or know how to compose music. The kids explore combinations, I join in, and sometimes I keep playing after they've moved on.

It's quietly educational. The kids are learning rhythm and pattern recognition without noticing. It's hands-on, beautifully designed, and makes music something you can easily play with.

The Product

Loops Lab is a "phygital" music toy built around collectible figurines. Each character sits on a magnetic base. Place it on the stage and it plays its loop. Tap it twice or three times on the stage and it has two more additional loops, three in total. Stack multiple characters and the sounds layer together. Pull one off and the track shifts. The system connects via Bluetooth to the free Loops Lab app on iOS or Android for playback, but the actual play experience is entirely hands-on and screen-free.

Current bands available:

A friend started using an app that records him while he sleeps. When he listened to the recordings, he was surprised to discover himself talking in his sleep, and recalled a hazy dream where he was confronting a criminal (the words below are actually what was recorded from his sleep-talking).

I wanted to experiment a bit with all this AI music generation stuff, and boom - a song and music video in about 12 hours of work over a long weekend. Science fiction until about two years ago, especially by someone who doesn't know how to play an instrument or how music works beyond an instinctive level.

SUNO did a great job getting things started, but the output wasn't exactly what I was looking for. I generated several songs in different styles and settings. I liked the vocals in one variation but not the rest, and liked most of another variation. So I started mixing and matching.

Hard Drive Speakers

Update: See them play the legendary Second Reality demo by Future Crew.

The kids and I disassembled roughly 40 hard drives.

That's where this started. A pile of old drives, a box of Torx screwdrivers, and kids who were absolutely willing to take things apart.

The goal: build speakers from the drives. Actual stereo speakers, using the read/write head coil as a voice coil. Wire it to an amplifier. The actuator arm vibrates. It makes sound.

It works better than it should.

The idea wasn't original. People have been wiring drive coils to amps for years. A quick search turns up dozens of experiments, ranging from quick tests to proper tutorials to someone asking the obvious question out loud. One person even went further and attached a speaker cone to the actuator arm to improve output.

Each speaker is a pair of drives on a panel. One handles bass, one handles treble. A passive crossover splits the signal. The drives are open, covers removed, platters exposed. In the mockup iterations, the panels were wood.

Later, 3D printed enclosures with a cleaner fit and attempted acoustics.

The enclosures were too large to print in one piece, so I split them into sections, connected them with screws hidden below the covers, and filled the gaps with black hot melt glue.

Updated November 2016 after Netflix acquired the film - clip added, post expanded with details from interviews that followed the theatrical run.

Tonight I attended a festive pre-release screening of "Presenting Princess Shaw" at the Petach Tikva Museum of Art cinematheque.

Remember when I wrote about Thru You Too a year ago and mentioned Princess Shaw? There's a documentary. And it's extraordinary.

The film was first screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July, followed by its international premiere at Toronto in September. Tonight was a festive pre-theatrical release screening. Writer and director Ido Haar was there to introduce it and take questions.

The Setup

Ido Haar is a longtime friend of Kutiman. His previous films include 9 Star Hotel (2006), about Palestinians working illegally as construction workers in Israel, which was nominated for a European Film Award.

Update: I've added the new album to thru-you.org - downloads, metadata, and links to all the original source videos.

Another update: more details and links.

Last month Kutiman released a remix project for Thru You Too: ten international producers, each interpreting his YouTube mashups through their own lens. The project launched with its own website and spans cumbia, dub, house, hip-hop, dark disco, future jazz, and more.

The concept is recursive in the best way. Kutiman found strangers on YouTube and stitched them into songs. Now other producers are taking those songs and making them into something else entirely. A remix of a remix of found footage.

"I'm New" (Thru You)

Copia Doble Systema (Global Bass / Cumbia) - Norwegian DJ Copyflex started this project in Copenhagen in 2009. They call it "cumbia vikingo." High-energy tropical bass with syncopated percussion and digital brass stabs. Supported by Diplo, Gilles Peterson. Listen here.

Update: I've added the new album to thru-you.org - downloads, metadata, and links to all the original source videos.

Five and a half years ago, Kutiman blew my mind. Today he did it again.

Thru You Too dropped today. Six new tracks, same magic: unrelated YouTube videos of people playing music in their bedrooms, practice rooms, garages. People who never met. Kutiman found them, cut them, stitched them together into something larger than its parts.

He told Yahoo why it took five years:

It took me a few years to get back to the point where ... I'm doing it freely. From an honest place where I'm not trying to bring the next thing, and just do it for fun.

The first single, "Give It Up", dropped on YouTube September 12 and hit a million views in days.

The vocalist is an aspiring singer from New Orleans who goes by the name KarMaRedd or "Princess Shaw". Her videos barely break a hundred views. The day after the single dropped, she posted a thank-you video. Someone had emailed her: did you hear the remix of your song? She didn't even know how to pronounce Kutiman's name. "It was so surreal," she says. "Almost in tears."

"No One In This World" followed, published about a week ago.

The remaining four tracks + companion website (thru-you-too.com) launched today.
The full playlist is here.

Six female vocalists anchor this album - R&B, soul, groove. Warmer sound than the original Thru You.