Sound UbuWeb

Brian Joseph Davis (b. 1975) Brian Joseph Davis on UbuWeb Original Soundtrack (2008) Song One Song Two Song Three Song Five NOTES Original Soundtrack is a live performance of 20 television sets and DVD players. On each DVD player is a different, commercially available movie left at its "menu" stage. The DVDs all feature endlessly looping musical cues (this is a design feature found on approximately 50% of all DVDs). Performed using a customized mixer, loops are combined and stacked, resulting in a slightly unstable but scored performance. NY Press wrote of its performance at Issue Project Room: ""The beauty of it though, was that as soon as I tuned out, I in fact, tuned in. When I stopped any focus on the performance I entered into some sort of light hypnosis. There was a kind of magnificence to it, there's no doubt. The 50-minute piece was anything but boring--more like a peaceful, unstructured audiovisual meditation. It was just so nice to absorb something without having to do any work, and to find the subtle musical wonders in fact quietly, harmlessly, mystically, working me over... Its essence wasn't defined by experimentation, the avant-garde or artistic snobbery: the piece was all about abandoning expectations, pretensions and artificiality. Because the magic of Davis's performance was that it really did make you think. Or not."