The second in our inaugural year of quarterly musical games/projects. The first being the Harry Candy game that became Ball of Wax no.11, This one is a two CD free download.
The White Elephant Record Exchange Project was undertaken by 20 individuals in the late part of January 2008. The project involved sampling, composition, and ultimately all kinds of editing and manipulation of various original source materials. Participants were first to find the “worst” and “most unusable” 12″ vinyl record possible and hand it off to the curator. Those records were then distributed to the participants insuring everyone received a different record than the one they submitted. After receiving this record, the first goal was to complete one song.
SONG A
The point of Song A was to compose a piece of around 1 minute, 30 seconds or longer, through editing and creative playback of the record alone. No pitch adjustment, time stretching, compression, or any digital effects were allowed in this phase of the project. This meant that the participant could basically just cut and paste, do a bit of layering, and then adjust track levels. It was essentially an exercise in composition to see what each individual could create with supposedly “unusable” source material and very limiting constraints.
Those songs were all finished and then given back to the curator. Once all the songs were gathered, they were then redistributed back to the original person that submitted the 12″ vinyl. For example, if you submitted Led Zeppelin “III” as your album, you then got the remixed, cut-up piece someone created from that album. Then the Song B phase began.
SONG B
The creation of this song had no boundaries whatsoever. The idea was now to allow each participant total freedom (without the difficult constraints of the Song A phase) to create a remix of someone else’s Song A piece.
