You may have noticed that I don't tend to post live albums unless they are of historical significance, and I think this one certainly qualifies for that.
On 13 September 2014 the music of John Cale converged with the speculative architecture visions of Liam Young at the Barbican’s Digital Revolution exhibition, for the first-ever drone orchestra performance. It was a whirlpool of collective, creative energy, coming from a swarm of unmanned flying objects programmed to entertain, instead of kill. 'Loop>>60Hz: Transmissions From The Drone Orchestra' was a collaboration between airborne architecture and music, which came about after Young received a phone call from Cale who had seen an earlier work of his called Electronic Counter Measures, in which wi-fi routers on a flock of drones broadcast a pirated Internet signal, like an "aerial Napster". Young had also begun testing speakers on drones, launching ones at Burning Man that played Wagner’s 'Flight Of The Valkyries', while Cale was an innovator in the music world, intrigued by the opportunity to embed his signature audio style onto a flying multichannel orchestra. As Young and Cale talked, they imagined what a drone could become once it was stripped of its traditional narrative of war and terror, and their vision was to have drones shed their hard technological shells and take on more human-like characteristics, by blending live audio with the mechanical bots. It took two years to find the right venue, as putting these technologies above people’s heads could be really violent, but The Barbican Theatre bravely stepped up to the plate. Cale remixed and reengineered his music for the performance, changing the arrangements to make them much harder, and more urban and colder. This made the voices stand out more, and the singing that much more emotional.
A few drones from a flock of 15 would carry his voice to different areas in the room during the performance, while additional flying bots were augmented with speakers to amplify the mechanical humming of their motors, generating noise that was then incorporated into the live composition. Software lead Andreas Müller developed an ultrasonic beacon tracking system that could allow the team to manipulate light, create a smoky haze effect, and use the whole of the theatre for their choreography. Like dancers or actors, the drones had their own couture costumes, such as bright green and blue plumage, a coat made from 500 phone charms sourced from Chinese markets, a box-like structure decorated with hazard tape, and even a shiny disco suit made from 4,000 fake nails. Producer Keri Elmsly stood in the orchestra pit during the performance, coordinating take-offs and landings. The original plan for the performance was to have the drones be autonomous, but when the automated system failed, the team had to adjust the show for manual overrides, and a team of pilots took over. With the weights on the bodies of the drones, the batteries drained quickly, within five-to-ten minutes, and so a team of battery changers had to resuscitate the drones periodically during the 80-minute-long performance. Cale's music was a mix of new and old material, including radical reworkings of classic old tracks, such as distorted 'Mercenaries' and 'Sanities' set to a lurching heigh-ho Tom Waits beat, and then towards the end of the concert there was an extended 'Sister Ray', as if rewritten for a disco in hell. There is a bit of wind noise in this recording, as because it was an inside performance, when the drones flew overhead, the down draught was picked up on the recorder, but I've tried to remove as much of it as I can, and it only affected about four of the tracks.
Track listing
01 Instrumental
02 Mercenaries (Ready For War)
03 If You Were Still Around
04 December Rains
05 Caravan
06 Half Past France
07 Mothra
08 Sandman (Flying Dutchman)
09 Gravel Drive
10 Letter From Abroad
11 Sanities
12 Wasteland
13 Sister Ray
14 Strange Times In Casablanca
15 [Standing Ovation]
