Radiohead’s “Nude” played by old gadgets

James Houston’s haunting remix of Radiohead’s Nude is made of a ZX Spectrum, a Scanjet 3c, an ancient scanner and a rackful of ruined hard drives. If you subject yourself to one wonderful cacophony this week, make it this one.

via Gizmodo

1. [shutz]

   I bow to James Houston’s talent and dedication in producing this outstanding and haunting (I know I’m using Rob’s word here, but it’s precisely how I felt when the music sprang out of all the initial noise.)

   I guess all I can do now is to plug my own puny remix, which can be found at:
   http://radioheadremix.com/remix/?id=1924

   It’s nowhere near as impressive, but I’m still proud of it. (And it’s not like I’m whoring it out, as voting is over on that site.)

2. [Doomstalk]

   The HDD speakers remind me of a hack a good friend of mine made: http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm

3. [tylersweeney]

   this is exactly why i go on bb gadgets when i’m high.

   marvelous.

4. [dw_funk]

   I hope when we’re all uploaded to the Cloud, this is what our music sounds like.

5. [License Farm]

   The vocal effects from the hard drives is amazing, as is the rest of this. One semantical quibble: if this uses no elements from the original, is it really a remix, or is it a cover?

6. [Milarepa]

   BEAUTIFUL!
   A shame that I’m not high *g*
   #1s use of the word haunting is exactly how I felt.
   #5 I think the casette player ‘has the song in it’.
   so it might be a remix…

7. [JayeRandom]

   If you feed the audio from 0:10 to 1:09 into a ZX, will it render as the BASIC program used to perform the melody?

8. [dculberson]

   Yeah, the hard drives area really just acting as voice coils, playing a recording of the song. So it’s a remix rather than a cover..

   That is to say, it’s an awesome remix.

9. [historyman68]

   @8 – tiny correction: the hard drives are probably just playing the voice track, since that was made publicly available, not the entire song.

   Sorry – but yeah, it is beautiful.