The Audience will become the Artist

August 28, 2021 10:41 AM

Glenn Gould: Uninvited Guests. [archive version] In celebration of what would have been his 88th birthday, a group of hip-hop and electronic artists (with the blessing of the Gould estate) took some Gould samples and ran with them. Listen to the album.
posted by storybored (9 comments total)

(Looks like the article in the first link is paywalled...at least accessing it from Japan.)
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 11:11 AM on August 28, 2021

Paywalled in the US, too.

You can listen to selections on iTunes.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 12:14 PM on August 28, 2021

Links:
1) The first link on archive.org.
2) Episode 1 of 4 of background discussion of this project.

Part of the point of this project is that Gould was interested in the role of electronics in future music and saw the future listener as an active creator of their own experience by splicing and re-mixing and messing with other people's music on their own equipment.

Here is a relevant portion of a Gould interview I heard recently that starts with talk of editing and tape splicing and ends with a brief discussion of electronic music. This is from 1968.
posted by sylvanshine at 12:42 PM on August 28, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also available on YouTube and Spotify. If you are interested in Gould, I highly recommend the strange and wonderful Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 12:51 PM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was just telling my fam (again) that we have to watch Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould! (We decided to show Umbrella Academy to my partner's mom).

We drove through Wawa on an epic cross-Canada road trip a couple of years ago. Not exactly a pilgrimage, but I was glad to see it.

I was really hoping For All Mankind would do a Saturn V launch sequence with Glenn Gould playing Bach on the soundtrack (Colm Feore played Werner von Braun in that show).

I'm looking forward to checking out these links.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 8:35 PM on August 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

More mainstream than I expected. These remixes are well-crafted, but contemporary pop/rap isn't really my thing. I thought it would be something more on the experimental/glitch/ambient spectrum.

Always a good excuse to recommend 32 Short Films again.
posted by ovvl at 10:31 AM on August 29, 2021

I'm sorry, but autotuning on top of Glenn Gould? I don't think so. Thanks, hippybear, for the 32 Short Films link -- I look forward to watching that again.
posted by Scarf Joint at 3:33 PM on September 1, 2021

I was hoping someone would digitally extract Glenn's crooning and grunting, and maybe blend with some of Keith Jarrett's vocalizations, and turn them into sweet vocal harmonies.
posted by ovvl at 4:55 PM on September 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is almost ludicrously targeted towards me, and I have been vibing to it.
Some of the samples are decontextualised to almost complete abstraction and yet you can hear Gould in the touch of the keys.

Thank you for posting, storybored!
posted by Wrinkled Stumpskin at 1:53 PM on September 4, 2021 [1 favorite]