Week 5 - Forum

This week’s topic of our forum was again “Collaboration”.Firstly, it was Luke Digance who presented the story of the collaboration between bands Radiohead, Sigur Ros and the dance company of Merce Cunningham. The act was called Split Sides and was performed in October 2003.

Having pictures being shown on the screen, he told us about the background of each of these artists.
He noted the importance of the use of electronic music in the career of Radiohead (while the song Idioteque was being played as the speech’s theme!). Introducing their albums and side projects of band members, he also mentioned Radiohead’s influences in few of their albums and other projects.
Then we were told of the story of Sigur Ros; their origin –Iceland-, the band’s special characteristics like the use of a bow for guitar and some other notable issues about them.
He read a the New York Times’ review on the act and finished the presentation by answering students’ questions.
Daniel Murtagh went next and introduced (or rather talked about) Faith No More’s Mike Patton. This individual has been collaborated with numerous musicians and non-musicians throughout the years and it is impossible to revise all he has done in a single presentation. Daniel talked about some of his interesting techniques of live performing (for instance utilising several microphones in order to get various sounds on stage) and named few people who he has collaborated with, such as John Zorn.
He played several tracks of different genres all having Patton as either the composer or one of the performers.
Darren Slynn came and brought a question whether in many cases, collaboration was a necessity instead of a creative idea. He provided different examples and told us about several people who have collaborated with some others just because of the lack of musical knowledge, or as a result of not having enough facilities, etc.

He particularly focused on the works of Steely Dan (and showed us parts of the DVD “Steely Dan Confessions”) and Frank Zappa. In Zappa’s case, he expressed that the basic reason he collaborated with “film people” –as he addressed Zappa’s collaborators- was that he was a musician; that collaboration had facilitated Zappa’s way towards his aims.
Overall, Darren’s presentation was the best so far, in my opinion.
The last was Alfred Essemyr who talked about “Collaboration on demand”.
He focused on the fact that in many cases (particularly the music scene in England), musicians collaborate with magazines, mix-tapes and mix-CDs and other sorts of media to promote their works and to get known to audience. Providing few examples of drum n bass music as well as other genres, he explained how the idea of distributing a song would collaborate with the idea of commercialising through various mediums.