Every Recording of Eric Satie’s Gymnopedie 1

Brendan Landis, who records as Hey Exit, created this sonic thought experiment, taking multiple performances of Erik Satie’s classic Gymnopedie 1, time-stretching each to the same length and then mixing them together. 

The result is a performance by a chorus of pianists, that starts and ends in tight synchronization, but blurs into an ambient wash in between, because of the performers’ expressive variations. It’s a bit like Satie via Budd & Eno.

via Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet, who says:

There’s a joke about being hit by either a ton of bricks or a ton of pillows, and how either way it’s a ton — at some point weight trumps texture. Landis’ experiment reveals that amassed pillowy music doesn’t gather in density so much as exaggerate its inherent properties: a cloud becomes the sky.

6 thoughts on “Every Recording of Eric Satie’s Gymnopedie 1

  1. Very enjoyable.

    Would be fun to create a MIDI plug-in that did this: each note on or note off would be delayed & repeated many times randomly within a configurable gaussian distribution. Automatic dream music 🙂

    It would only need three parameters: average delay, number of repeats, and standard deviation.
    Icing on the cake: apply to velocity too.

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