Just imagine an orchestra made-up of more than 200 musicians from all four corners of the world playing all manner of instruments from the Philippine gong to the Chinese one stringed erhu.
That’s the line-up music lovers can expect at Harwich’s Electric Palace this weekend at a very special gig as part of the town’s arts festival.
And while the musicians might not all be there in person, thanks to the curatorial and mixing genius of duo Addictive TV, they will be there in spirit and sound.
The Orchestra of Samples, like all brilliant ideas, is a pretty simple one as one half of Addictive TV Graham Daniels tells me.
“It came from us travelling around doing our gigs,” he says, “and us not wanting to simply just fly in and fly out again. There was also our desire to take what we do somewhere else and the two merged together.”
So that’s what Graham, along with Mark Vidler, did.
The project features many top musicians in their field and documents a range of unusual localised instruments.
Everything from the two-stringed dombyra of Kazakhstan to recycled car exhaust pipes in Brazil used as percussion, even a French bagpipe called a Boudègue made entirely from a goat. Artists include OBE-awarded sitar player Baluji Shrivastav, Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier and Senegalese rap-star Matador.
Graham adds: “We began Orchestra of Samples with no preconceptions, just a curiosity to explore musical possibilities with the pop-up recording sessions being organised whenever we could.
“When we got back we would catalogue them by country, then the key and rough tempos. From that we’ve built melodies and music by mixing them together.
“We started in 2010 with a French drummer and did our last one a few months ago, which was a German rapper called Likkle T, although it’s an ongoing project for sure.
“What’s been particularly interesting is how there’s a commonality in music. You’ll hear a piece from some trumpet player in Africa and you’ll think ‘hang on, that sounds like the guy from China we recorded two years ago’.”
Last year the pair finally released their album Orchestra of Samples, which took those musicians, who had never met, but had been sampled by Graham and Mark, to ingeniously create a new musical fusion, which celebrated a mosaic of genuine conversations between different musics of the world.
“It’s also been an incredible gateway to music,” Graham continues, “introducing people to instruments and styles of music they would never have heard before.
“Obviously it’s almost impossible to actually bring these musicians together to perform live so I suppose this is the next best thing.
“We did a performance recently in front of a group of classically trained musicians and they couldn’t believe what we had done. There’s no fiddling around with the key or tempo, we’ve just seemlessly mixed the different pieces of music together.”
Addictive TV have been at the forefront of audio and video remixing for nearly two decades and because of their visual element, they were also twice voted Number One VJ in the world alongside the Top 100 DJs in DJ Mag.
Criss-crossing the art and music worlds, creating performances and installations for the likes of the Pompidou Centre in Paris and Museum of Contemporary Arts in Shanghai, and playing at events including the UK’s Glastonbury Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, the duo have now performed in more than a staggering 50 countries.
“I started off in television,” Graham says, “while Mark was in bands. I first started doing stuff for ITV which eventually led to the low budget late night telly show Mixmasters. It was proper thrown in at the deep end stuff but I learnt a lot in terms of the visuals and VJing.
“I met Mark along the way, who at the time was well known as a mash-up DJ. We did the first ever mash-up album released by EMI which included Blondie’s Rapture with the Doors Riders on the Storm, and went from there.”
The duo were also the first artists sanctioned by a Hollywood studio to audio visually remix a film back in 2006, with the Antonio Banderas movie Take The Lead.
“When we got the call,” he adds, “we thought someone was playing a prank on us, or we might be in trouble for doing something we shouldn’t have, but then we called them back and they said they loved what we were doing and would we like to do something for the studio.”
Addictive TV have also created commercials and other work for the likes of Adidas, Red Bull, EA Games, Greenpeace, Namco, even Hollywood studios including Paramount and 20th Century Fox have used their movie remixing talents to create alternative trailers for films such as Slumdog Millionaire, Iron Man and Fast and Furious.
Graham says: “It’s funny because when you try to explain what we do, people generally have trouble working out what it is but then of course when they see us at a performance they go ‘oh cool, yeah I see what this is’.
“At South by South West a few years back we were playing a gig with Moby and afterwards he came in and said ‘man, you guys are a hard act to follow, I’ve just got the music, you’ve got the music and the visuals.”
Addictive TV play the Electric Palace, Harwich, on Saturday at 7.30pm. Tickets are £10, available from www.harwichfestival.co.uk
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