Candied Pop

Trawling the Internet can often dredge up some truly fascinating things, in this case a Wired article pointed me in the direction of PLOrk, “15 first-year students on Macs connected to custom omnidirectional speakers can emulate a full-fledged philharmonic. Or an electronica band. Or a jazz combo.” That hooked me.

Immediately, I was filled with visions of young students hunched over notebooks furiously left and right clicking creating a sweaty grind not unlike Kosmic Kommando’s Laptop Dancing. Reality, however, is a little different. The first PLOrk concert opens with the charming ABC song where each performer recorded themselves reciting each letter of the alphabet and then assigned it to the corresponding key on the keyboard. From there, the concert touches upon ambient drones, somewhat abstract work reminiscent of Illbient, and even gamelan. While performances like this have been happening for decades, such as the more recent Chip Music movement, it shows that the establishment is beginning to accept electronic music as a viable form of expression rather than being a sandbox for theories.

I found the concert to be fun and thought provoking and would definitely recommend you give it a listen. The concert can be downloaded in its entirety at their website. Part of me wishes that I was fourteen years younger and wealthy enough to attend a school like Princeton because I would be dying to be a part of this ensemble, alas I’ll have to settle for being firmly entrenched in my thirties and too poor for a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 9:38 am and is filed under 2006, Album, Free Tracks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.