Beck to Remix Philip Glass – Plus, Glass’s “Greatest Hits” … (or something like that…)
“I kept running back upstairs to rehearse [during others' performances at the show]… I was so nervous!”
-Philip Glass on preparing to play with The Flaming Lips, to Vulture
“He’s a weirdo and he’s nice and he’s crazy and he’s musical and he’s got his own way of doing things…. He’s changing it every time we play. It kind of drives you crazy… He’s working out all these nuanced things and he kept thinking, ‘Let’s all play this together,’ and it quickly gets beyond my capabilities. You know, I’m just a guy singing and doing the best that I can, but we could tell he was starting to get on a trip.”
-Wayne Coyne on playing with Philip Glass, to Vulture
Beck – fresh off his production duties for Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, Thurston Moore and Charlotte Gainsbourg – is set to produce a Philip Glass remix album in collaboration with Hector Castillo (the engineer behind the mixes of David Bowie’s and Glass’s recent work). Castillo resume also lists names like Björk, Lou Reed and Roger Waters and according to his management, Cornelius, Amon Tobin and Tyondai Braxton (formerly of Battles) will contribute remixes for the new Beck/ Glass project. Other sources claim Memory Tapes are also set to remix Glass’ work. More remixers are likely to be announced as the project develops. Though no release date has been announced, the project may tie in with Glass’s 75th birthday next January 31st.
Beck hasn’t released an album or toured since 2008, but he has stayed busy with a variety of collaborative and production projects. In other Beck news, between October 20-23rd he returns to the stage for his first three concert appearances in nearly three years. Watch Beck live from the Bridge School Benefit on October 22nd – webcast details here.
from left: Castillo, Glass, Beck
In the early ‘70s Philip Glass presented groundbreaking work in his New York loft. His band sat in the middle of the room with the audience circling around and a huge quadrophonic stereo behind them. It’s events like these that made Glass an icon to music-lovers whom aren’t usually interested in “serious music.” Glass brought to the classical world the concept that loud music is - as he told Spin in 2008 – “like a river that sends up all this white foam. It was the foam I was interested in.” As both the first major composer to come of age with rock n’ roll and a pioneer of otherworldly electronic keyboard textures, Glass has long been admired by musicians from all backgrounds. His long history of collaborations include the coda to Paul Simon’s “The Late Great Johnny Ace”, Passagess with Ravi Shankar (whom he also studied under), his 1986 collaborative album Songs from Liquid Days (lyrics by Paul Simon, David Byrne, Suzanne Vega and Laurie Anderson), a series of symphonies based on David Bowie and Brian Eno’s Low and “Heroes,” the orchestration on Aphex Twin’s Icct Hedral (from 1995′s Donkey Rhubarb EP) and a 2007 adaptation of Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing for seven instruments and vocal quartet. This past March he performed “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” and “Do You Realize???” with The Flaming Lips at Carnegie Hall. Among people who aren’t generally familiar with his work, Glass is perhaps best known for Sesame Street’s “Geometry of Circle” and co-composing (with Burkhard Dallwitz) the score to Jim Carey’s 1998 movie The Truman Show - reworking his past themes (remixing himself in a sense…)
There’s been no indication yet if the above mentioned (cross-boundary, collaborative) compositions will be remixed for the Beck-helmed collection, or if the project will focus on his most acclaimed peices (i.e. Glassworks, Einstein on the Beach, Koyaanisqatsi, Akhnaten, Mad Rush, Metamorphosis, etc).
To grasp a bit of Glass’ musical openness, check out his comments on Aphex Twin from the October 1995 issue of Future Magazine, “This is a guy who conceptualises music… that’s what makes him interesting. What I heard in his music was the intention to discover a different mode of expression. Whether he reads music or studied at the conservatory isn’t important. Richard’s a guy who began by building his own synthesizers when he was a boy, putting odds and ends together – pieces of junk practically making sounds then taking those sounds and turning them into music. That’s interesting. I have some friends who go to the Berkley School of Music – it’s a very good school – but… not about building a synthesizer at home and making it burp and twurp and then seeing how it builds into a piece of music. He has a way of thinking that’s simplistic, and it’s interesting for me. I’m twice his age and more – I like meeting young people and seeing what they’re doing.”
An Introduction to Glass’s “Greatest Hits” (or something like that…)
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