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Musical Anarchists Wanted Immediately: 12 Interminable Days of Xmas Project

December 12, 2014 by Mark Linsenmayer 3 Comments

Update: this project is done: go listen!

I need collaborators for an evil Xmas prank/art piece to be completed ASAP, so if you know good musicians who record themselves at home, please forward a link to this post on to that person.

You know how "The 12 Days of Xmas" is about the most boring Xmas song ever? So, so long, going on and on. Well, I've had a long-standing joke whereby I start to sing that at "Ave Maria" speed, so even just the first verse is multiple minutes long.

I got to thinking that if you sing something slowly enough, then it ceases to be a melody and becomes atmosphere instead. What if I recorded the entirety of the 12 Days of Xmas, with each verse slower than the previous? Horribly boring and unlistenable? Well, yes, of course, but not so fast...

What if I got various musicians to each take just one verse and treat it like an environment, like a self-contained song that they could simply pick a beat for (or not!) pick an atmosphere for (spacey? jazzy? industrial? metal? funk? classical? avant garde atonal? pure noise?), and quickly layer some parts on it so that it's interesting to listen to?

So I'm trying it, and folks who want to participate should contact me at mark@partiallyexaminedlife.com and send me links to some of your work and I'll send you some guide tracks you can record against very quickly (this is supposed to be spontaneous; laboring over your parts is not going to make them better).

This demo version of verses 1-3 includes verse 3 (and verse 1 accompaniment) contributions by Swedish keyboardist Daniel Gustafsson, who played with me on another tune recently.

Listen to the Day 1-3 Demo.

As of the eve of 12/14, all of the verses have been assigned (I'm excited to say that this includes one of my musical idols, Jonathan Segel of Camper van Beethoven fame!), but for verse 12 (at 25 minutes long!) is shaping up to be a good old fashion interminable basement jam (with some overlaid spoken word stuff), and needs your contribution to fill up that vast ocean of time with interesting noodling. If you think you'll have time between now and Wednesday, drop me a line and I'll get you set up.

The plan includes posting some version to YouTube that people can torture each other with for years and years. I'd like to feature warped Xmas art by PEL fans in the video, so also contact me if you'd like to quickly churn out something that we can use for that.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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Filed Under: General Announcements, Nakedly Self-Examined Music

Comments

  1. Heath Benjamin Adams says

    December 13, 2014 at 8:44 pm

    Oh man! I just spent the weekend playing doom metal with a friend with whom I have a project that writes long, slow songs based on passages of philosophy. We were just talking about this. But the weekend is over 🙁

    Reply
  2. Jeff says

    December 20, 2014 at 1:58 pm

    What a cool song! Kind of what I would expect a Pink Floyd Christmas album to sound like. I absolutely love it and must download the mp3. Thanks for all the great effort to all who made it possible.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. 12 Interminable Days of Xmas: Hear the Longest, Trippiest Holiday Carol - Sot Pluk Sot Pluk says:
    December 23, 2014 at 12:25 pm

    […]  make this pleasingly bearable, even if an exercise in Zen-like patience, I crowd-sourced the backing arrangements for the verses among musician-fans of The Partially Examined Life podcast, plus a few special guests, including […]

    Reply

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