David Byrne Plays the Building!

In an extraordinary experience, Talking Head’s legendary front man David Byrne has come up with such a push-the-music-forward noble idea. Perhaps he’s had enough of all the sounds that come out of guitars and drums and keyboards and saxes! He’s trying to make sounds out of a building, that’s why the project is called “Playing the Building”! According to DavidByrne.com: “Playing the building is a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.”

So I guess we already ARE a part of the future. David Byrne collaborated with ambient mastermind Brian Eno (who has worked with Coldplay on their X&Y as well as their new album Viva La Vida) in 2006 on an album called My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts. So, at first glance I had a feeling this is an inspiring project based on that, but then I realized the whole project has been implemented and finalized in 2005 and it blew me away. I need to hear more stuff from Byrne, many people simply know him through his “Like Humans Do” MP3 track for Windows Media Player! (lol)

You can download a three page PDF file on this project here, or perhaps you want to know him better before that. Or perhaps you wanna go have a coffee and read papers.