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Artist
James Houston
12+ albums
alternativeelectronicalternative rockelectronic: minimal
about
James Houston is a student graduated from the Glasgow School of Art's visual communication course. His final project was Big Ideas (don't get any) (a music video of the Radiohead track Nude), the artist's own description of which follows. 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. Based on the lyric (and alternate title) "Big Ideas (Don't get any)" he 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. James Houston notes that he "decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit", and that "It doesn't sound great, as it's not supposed to". He missed the contest deadline, but he offered this masterpiece for the public. "Musical instruments" involved: Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhy