Double double figures
Breed and Pitch & Sync celebrate 10 years
As you know, Breed celebrated its 10th birthday this year. And it turns out our brothers and sisters in another medium, Pitch & Sync, are also celebrating their 10th this year. And to celebrate, we’re getting together for an exhibition in Amsterdam.
Sound and vision in perfect harmony
Pitch & Sync put music to work, adding sounds to brands – everything from curating existing music and clearing rights, to creating new compositions, sound design and sonic branding.
We’ve partnered with them before, our visuals complementing their sounds, and we have plans for something similar for this exhibition.
You hum it, we’ll draw it
Already, a number of our artists, including MASA, Danny Sangra and Steve Wilson, are working on pieces built around twin song titles – each of them acting as counterpoint to the other. You can see James Joyce’s piece opposite, merging 1959’s ‘Woo Hoo’ by The Rock-A-Teens with 1961’s ‘Boo Hoo’ by Marvin Rainwater, and here’s a taster of some of the combinations other artists are working on:
Steven Wilson is mashing up the Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint It, Black’ with Grandmaster Flash’s ‘White Lines’.
Danny Sangra‘s piece is juxtaposing lines from Wu-Tang and Jay-Z
MASA, meanwhile, is putting together Can’s ‘I Want More’ with Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s ‘You’re All I Need’.
Andy Gilmore is working with two of his favourite albums, both by David Axelrod, and based on works by William Blake, ‘Songs of Experience’ and ‘Songs of innocence’.
Help us prepare our 10-octave piano
Steve Wilson also has something else lined up – and you may be able to help. To mark those ten years, he’s helping to design the world’s first 10-octave prepared piano. What’s a prepared piano? Many years ago, composer John Cage wanted to use a piano to make a range of not necessarily piano-like percussive sounds. He achieved this by inserting a variety of objects between or on the strings. Like this one: youtube.com
Steve would like to hear your ideas for methods to ‘prepare’ his piano’s hammers to change its sound. He’ll incorporate some of your ideas into the design. How he’ll turn the normal seven and a bit octaves of a standard piano into ten is again something you’ll have to come along and discover for yourself.
Music to your eyes
The exhibition runs for one month, during the ADE/Amsterdam Dance Event, and will kick off with a private view on 28 September, at Pitch and Sync’s new home in Amsterdam, S.A.I. studios.
The address is:
Haarlemmerdijk 138 HS
1013 JJ Amsterdam
See you there.
