Big Ideas (don't get any)

Ganked from James Houston:

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. -JH

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

To blow past the screechy electronic intro, go about a minute and ten seconds in. This is one of the most creative things I've seen this year--thanks to the Esq for insisting that I watch it. I also love the vintage quality of the video shoot; very Napoleon Dynamite without the ironic edge. I wonder what kind of camera it was and how long it took to sync everything up. I wonder how he even thought of this.

The cool thing is, he missed the deadline for the contest, but two days ago, this video was the first link on Radiohead's official website. I'm always glad when a Big Band helps a Little Person become a Big Presence on the Web. Plus, the guy deserved it--the concept and execution of a project like this seems epic; that one dude pulled it off, in an almost breezy manner, is balls, man. Brav-o.