tracks 6 bass Donna Brown tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 bass Steve Dukich tracks 3 drums Mark Arm tracks 2, 4, 6, 7 drums Martin Bland tracks 3 electric piano John Wright tracks 6 guitar Jen Matson tracks 2, 5 guitar Mark Arm tracks 6 guitar Stu Spasm tracks 7 guitar Tim Kerr tracks 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 guitar Tom Price tracks 1, 3, 6, 7 organ Mark Arm tracks 7 organ Tom Price tracks 1 percussion Martin Bland tracks 5 percussion Martin Bland tracks 4, 6 piano Mark Arm tracks 3, 5, 7 saxophone Adam Weiss tracks 7 saxophone Renestair E.J. tracks 6 saxophone Steve Dukich tracks 7 synthesizer Mark Arm tracks 7 synthesizer Martin Bland tracks 6 toy piano Donna Brown tracks 5, 7 trombone Chris Stover tracks 1, 3, 4, 7 trumpet Jim Knodle tracks 4, 6 violin Janis Wildy tracks 3, 5, 6 violin Tom Swafford tracks 2 voice Dean Wynveen tracks 7 voice Donna Brown tracks 6 voice Jarold Ramsay tracks 7 voice Jen Matson tracks 2 voice Nico Vassilakis The premise involved using the shuffle program on a group of compact disc players running simultaneously to produce unique arrangements of original music. All of the pieces followed a few guidelines: the musicians should be recorded separately from one another with little or no idea what the other musicians had played. They would be given a loose theme to improvise on and a rigid tempo to follow.
These recordings, (sometimes hours long) were transferred on to a computer and cut into short phrases and fragments. The best of these were selected to be burnt onto cd-r's. Once all of the music for as piece had been recorded, each instrument was then assigned a cd player of which there were up to six.
The cd players were then played simultaneously with the shuffle program activated, thus producing a unique arrangement of the piece each time. Some of the voices were of a found nature but none of the music was sampled from other sources.
This regal looking object is the cover for the cd editions entitled Martin Bland's Randomized Control Trials. This project has consumed my non-parenting time for the last 5 years or so. The cd case, which was designed by Steve Dukich, is hand cut aluminum with individual circular brush marks and hand numbered braille indicating the edition number (there are 120 cds in all). Each of the 120 cd's has different music on it so each cd is exclusive unto itself. That's 720 different versions of the songs.
More details are here: http://martinblandsrct.blogspot.com/2008/03/cds-for-sale.html