Addictive TV explain their inspiration for the Orchestra of Samples, playing at Festival of Imagineers

The Festival of Imagineers culminates with an outdoor gig by the remarkable Addictive TV. The pioneering audio/visual remixers and electronic artists scoured the world to record musicians playing all kinds of instruments, from Brazil to Egypt to Bhutan. The result is the Orchestra of Samples, a digital supergroup of artists who have never met.

We asked Addictive TV to explain the inspiration for this ingenious project:

Orchestra of Samples has been a huge undertaking, with loads of organizing! We spent five years recording musicians while touring and performing around the world. We really wanted to collaborate with as many musicians internationally as possible and that's impractical in the real world but not in the digital world of sampling!

Recording in Lanzarote So we took a camera and recording equipment with us for years, filming hundreds of musicians everywhere we travelled, from Brazil and Mexico to Senegal in West Africa, across Europe, Kazakhstan, China and even Egypt during the revolution. In fact people often seem quite stunned by the fact we filmed all the artists in the whole project ourselves, and that we know every one of them personally.

Recording in Senegal We then spliced up all these thousands and thousands of recorded samples, creating new music, and of course visual music, as audiences can see the samples. When you see the show, we've recontextualised the musicians as if they are playing together, when in reality none of them ever met or heard any of the others.

Our creative process is simply just seeing which samples work together. The whole Orchestra of Samples project is an exploration into musical probability and serendipity. We bring together people who wouldn't normally play together, and instruments that normally would never be heard alongside each other. Working outside of normal musical conventions has really opened our eyes, finding incredibly unexpected combinations of instruments - some of which we didn't even know about!

Recording in Dakar See the Orchestra of Samples as part of Festival of Imagineers on Saturday 1 October at 9.30pm in Coventry Cathedral Ruins. Addictive TV give a pre-show talk at 7pm at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

Performing the Orchestra of Samples

LINK:	http://www.imagineer-productions.co.uk/addictive-tv-explain-their-insp...
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