Composer, robot maker, thereminist and historian of sound technology, Sarah Angliss, created this cover of the happy synth pop classic, Popcorn.
The arrangement uses sampled carillon, giving the track a holiday feel.
Here’s what she has to say about the cover and her video:
Some festive, unplugged 70s strangeness: my cover of Popcorn, played on the sampled carillon, with its own pair of binary videos.
I fell for the charms of 2-bit video when I was updating an installation that makes music by tracking butterflies in flight. I’d been experimenting with vision algorithms that reduce video to a simplified binary image (i.e. pure black and white, with no grayscale).
See Angliss’s site for more of her work.
Fantastic stuff!
Sarah is a modern visionary and I have been lucky enough to see her perform a few times with her band Spacedog.
Cool cover!
I don’t understand… Why black / white video is called “2-bit”?
Thanks for the mention. And Jack, oops, you’re absolutely right – it should say 1-bit video as it’s pure black and white with no grayscale, so every pixel is either off or on (although there is a cheat in final fadeout).
There’s an alternative 1-bit block version here: http://youtu.be/S2u1ka6nBVg
Thanks for pointing that out.
Happy holidays.
Sarah
Go Sarah!
Elegant job, Sarah! What a great twist on a classic theme. “Popcorn” is almost like a Bach piece in the synth lexicon. YouTube contains dozens of people playing it and I once quoted it myself. Its almost as seminal as Emerson’s square-wave lead on “Lucky Man.” Its fine alone, but its also a great insider joke.
I had the pleasure of seeing Gershon Kingsley and the First Moog Quartet live once, all rendered in real-time on Moog modulars. It was pretty magical, that being the first real cusp of the commercial synth age. That simple song was in my blood before I ever owned a synthesizer. They should play it at my funeral, right after Chuck Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business.”