Big Ideas (don’t get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.
From the author:

I’ve just graduated from the Glasgow School of Art’s graphic design course. This was my final project.

Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album - “In Rainbows” This was quite a difficult task for everybody that entered, as Nude is in 6/8 timing, and 63bpm. Most music that’s played in clubs is around 120bpm and usually 4/4 timing. It’s pretty difficult to seamlessly mix a waltz beat into a DJ set.

This resulted in lots of generic entries consisting of a typical 4/4 beat, but with arbitrary clips from “Nude” thrown in so that they qualified for the contest.

Thom Yorke joked at the ridiculousness of it in an interview for NPR radio, hinting that they set the competition to find out how people would approach such a challenging task.

I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

Based on the lyric (and alternate title) “Big Ideas: Don’t get any” I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there.

It doesn’t sound great, as it’s not supposed to.

I missed the contest deadline, so I’m offering it here for you to enjoy.

Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX

Here’s something I’ve experienced first hand and it was a head-scratcher to be sure. I was video taping a concert with my camera (Canon HG20) and after a while, it would freak out. It would complain of a buffer overflow. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? I asked myself. I was trying to trouble shoot it while loosing some really nice footage of a live concert. I downgraded the data rate on my camera for a while and broke out my phone in the mean time to try to figure out what was going on. I found this guy’s blog who had a similar problem. Basically, the noise from the concert was causing the hard drive to vibrate. The fellow on that blog theorized the drop sensor was kicking in, and causing the hard drive to park itself, and video to go into a buffer. It happened so much the buffer would fill up and the camera would have to stop recording. I tried turning off the drop sensor (in addition to lowering the data rate). It might have helped the situation a little bit, but it still happened. I think the only solution to recording a concert or loud event like that with a hard drive camera is to get some foam padding around the camera and cover everything up except the lens and get an external mic for the sound.

To demonstrate this theory, check out this video: