Deviation String Quartet

December 9, 2011 7:26 AM

On 13 October, Red Bull Music Academy went to London for Revolutions in Sound, filling each pod of the London Eye with a different musical act. One of them was Benji B with special guests The Deviation String Quartet and MC Judah. Here's a video of an hour of mixing UK garage and hip hop with live strings.
posted by sveskemus (11 comments total)

Interesting idea, but he's just playing records while they're playing strings over it. I thought the Nero's 'dubstep symphony' was more interesting since they actually arranged the songs for orchestra and performed them live.

Paul van Dyk has also done this a couple of times.

Still, it's got a good track selection so far and it's good background music.
posted by empath at 7:50 AM on December 9, 2011

This is a good topic for a post, but I wish the OP had gone into a little more detail about the event. As part of the lead up to this year's RBMA sessions, they'd done a series of events all over the world, the London event being just one of them, some of them are really cool ideas (eg: building a soundsystem in Cape Town and then throwing a big party).

As for the London one, when it was first announced, my friends and I all concluded that the RBMA team in London had sat down and thought, "What's the craziest fucking thing we could ever possibly do?" and then they went and did it. That audio from ALL of the pods was up (and was also all streamed live the night it happened), which I thought was interesting and helped take the sting out of the fact that each pod only holds something like 20 people.

A bunch of my current favorite UK DJs were tapped to play various ones of the pods. In particular I'd recommend the Hessle Audio, Jackmaster b2b Deadboy and Horsemeat Disco sets, but I've listened to almost all of them and there's stuff to like about each one.
posted by sparkletone at 8:22 AM on December 9, 2011

sparkletone, the audio from all the pods is still up, you can stream it at the first link. I just thought the Benji pod was the most interesting and I really liked the video.
posted by sveskemus at 8:27 AM on December 9, 2011

I'm actually really enjoying this, just as a DJ set. Quite lovely and chilled out.
posted by empath at 8:41 AM on December 9, 2011

Yes I liked this. Nice to see the performance beng put together. Thanks for posting!
posted by carter at 8:45 AM on December 9, 2011

Obligatory:

"London Symphony Orchestra? Anyone order the London Symphony Orchestra? Possibly while high? I'm looking at you Cypress Hill..."
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 9:16 AM on December 9, 2011

Yeah the DJ Set is good, but I'd prefer to just hear the regular songs
posted by azarbayejani at 9:23 AM on December 9, 2011

Yeah, this is nice and super chill. Where can I get a whole album that sounds just like this?
posted by word_virus at 11:49 AM on December 9, 2011

You can listen to Benji B every week on the BBC's website.
posted by empath at 12:00 PM on December 9, 2011

It's a shame Red Bull's product is so vile. I really love their marketing.

Waiting for them to acquire 5 Hour Energy...
posted by LordSludge at 12:36 PM on December 9, 2011

sparkletone, the audio from all the pods is still up

Yeah. My use of the past tense there was accidental, due to rewriting the sentence half way through.

Good post though! I was mostly just nitpicking because this was a really cool event that was part of a series of them. The Benji B one would've been a great hook for a slightly longer post. Still good as is though!
posted by sparkletone at 8:34 AM on December 10, 2011