Obsolete technology band

Sean Percival — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 05:00:00 +0000

Radiohead held a contest for fans to remix the single Nude from their album In Rainbows. Frontman Thom Yorke mentioned on NPR that the contest was essentially a joke, since the Nude track is recorded at 6/8 timing and 63bpm, much slower than traditionally mixed music. The above video from [James Houston] is one of the most creative entries. Using old computer hardware he has recreated the track in a very unique way. He uses a Sinclair ZX Spectrum for the guitar track, a dot matrix printer for the drums, a scanner for bass, and a hard drive array for vocals.

Want to make your own band with obsolete technology? Click through for a few pointers to get you started.

Scanners used to be the hot peripherals of their day; now many are reduced to collecting dust. Revive these relics and put them to good use as instruments.

In the Radiohead video we saw an array of hard drives used as speakers. Afrotechmod created the video above featuring the Star Wars theme. He wired the audio input directly to the coils used to control head and platter motion. Since all hard drives are different it may take a little poking around to get the desired effect.

Dot matrix printers are well known for their iconic sounds. In the above video, [Sue Harding] tells us about her experiences with them and how she plays around with color and character density to create new sounds.

Lastly, we have the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. While it’s not entirely clear what program is being used, there are quite a few audio trackers available for the platform. The video above is a ZX Spectrum demo made by Digital Reality.

[via Waxy]

Hack a Day » sinclair

Obsolete technology band