REWORK_ is an album of Philip Glass's music remixed by the likes of Beck, Amon Tobin, and Nosaj Thing. There is also an interactive iOS app that lets you play around and remix your own Glass compositions.
REWORK_ features eleven "music visualizers" that take the remixed tracks and create interactive visuals that range from futuristic three-dimensional landscapes to shattered multicolored crystals, and vibrating sound waves. People can lean back and enjoy REWORK_ end to end, or they can touch and interact with the visualizers to create their own visual remixes.
In addition to the visualizers, the app includes the "Glass Machine" which lets people create music inspired by Philip Glass' early work by simply sliding two discs around side-by-side, almost like turntables. People can select different instruments - from synthesizer to piano, and generate polyrhythmic counterpoints between the two melodies.
The app was made by Scott Snibbe's studio...I fondly recall his Java applets. (BTW, "fondly recall his Java applets" is neither a euphemism nor something that anyone will understand 5-10 years from now.)
The sound and picture are poor, but the entirety of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time is available on YouTube.
Featuring music from Philip Glass, the film is a documentary about Stephen Hawking and his ideas about the universe. Morris recently stated on Twitter:
Yes. I plan to re-release [A Brief History of Time]. (It was never properly color corrected and is one of my best films.)
The film is difficult, if not impossible, to find on DVD and isn't available on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or iTunes. And as far as I can tell, the soundtrack was never released either.
Occupy Wall Street went up to protest at Lincoln Center last night during a performance of Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross was there and captured the protest on video, which included Glass himself reading the closing lines from the opera, amplified to the crowd by the people's mic. It is an amazing scene.
When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita (after 3:00 in the video above): "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again." True to form, he said it several times, with the "human microphone" repeating after him. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, and at one point Reed helped someone crawl over the barricade that had been set up along the sidewalk.
KOYAANISQATSI, [Godfrey] Reggio's debut as a film director and producer, is the first film of the QATSI trilogy. The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning "life out of balance." Created between 1975 and 1982, the film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds -- urban life and technology versus the environment. The musical score was composed by Philip Glass.
The entire film is available on both YouTube and Hulu.
Lose yourself in Philip Glass's powerful music for the 1982 Godfrey Reggio film Koyaanisqatsi: A Life Out Of Balance, performed live by the Philharmonic and the Philip Glass Ensemble, as the landmark film is projected on a huge screen above the Avery Fisher Hall stage.
There will be two performances, Nov 2 and Nov 3 at 7:30pm at Avery Fisher Hall. There are still tons of great seats available, but get 'em while you can. Excited!
IBM is celebrating 100 years of business with a pair of videos; the following is a 30-minute film by Errol Morris (music by Philip Glass) on the history of the company.
A second film, 100 x 100, shows 100 people each presenting an IBM milestone that occurred the year they were born; not sure if Morris did this one as well. (via df)
