Labyrinth Ear

Labyrinth Ear are synth-pop duo hailing from South East London.

An amazing electronic cover of a Disney song was what turned me onto them, but because they're such a new band (formed last summer) there wasn't much info out there... So I dropped them a line to see what I could see.  (Interview after the tracks)

You can get their Oak EP free off their site.

"Snow White" (video is taken from the Betty Boop film of the same name)


"White Gold" (Video features puppet work of the late Czech animator Jiri Trnka)


"Wild Flowers"

"Navy Light" (video taken from the David Bowie film "Labyrinth")

Morning Parade - Under the Stars (Labyrinth Ear remix)

- How did "Labyrinth Ear" come together?

Tom had made music for a while but hadn't really shared any of his music with anyone before, I'd never planned to be a singer and was applying for university to study fashion design, then Tom played me a couple of his tracks he had made several years ago and I was stunned, they were really good and no one had ever heard them before, I encouraged him to start producing again and to look for musicians and vocalists to produce for, he was unable to find people, so I reluctantly offered to do some vocals for a couple of tracks he had produced, we uploaded 1 or 2 onto myspace and the response we got was amazing. We haven't stopped since then! I never knew how satisfying it was to produce music and to finish tracks, I now feel like this what I should have been doing all along! All I can say is if you think you can't do something, just try it and see.

- What are your influences (musically and otherwise). 

Our influences are very varied and vast, my taste is quite odd sometimes, most of my music collection is made up of film soundtracks, Tom has quite a big music collection, a lot of electronic stuff. A few influences we both agree upon would be Arthur Russell, Joanna Newsom and John Maus.

Non musically, we're both very much into art and film. I'm into fashion, you also might have noticed that we like cats.

- How did "Snow White" come about?

This was our first track, I'd never written lyrics or songs before so we decided to do a cover. It was my idea to do 'I'm Wishing' from Snow White, it seemed a bit silly at first, but we were delighted with the result and completely amazed at the response we had to it.

- You're a pretty new band - what are your hopes for '11?

Yes, we are quite new. We're really excited about 2011 - we have a lot of aims for the year. At the moment we're working on lots more tracks, remixes, music videos, and playing plenty of shows.

Disney versus Daft Punk

"Tron" hits cinemas today, featuring a much anticipated soundtrack by Daft Punk.  And quelle surprise, how boring is the theme tune?  I'm not even going to use the "S.O" phrase because this musical effort is simply the latest in a long line of mediocrity since "Discovery".

Incidentally, the film looks pretty cool!

Pale Man versus No-Headed Princess

You can't beat a good monster, and from the first time I saw "Pan's Labyrinth", I thought the Pale Man scene was one of the creepiest, and most original, in movie history.

But after randomly watching the 1985 film "Return to Oz", I'm not so sure.  Are these scenes similar or is it just me?




Stranger things have happened than a macabre film director being influenced by a Disney film!

POGO

A few years ago on youtube I stumbled upon 'Alice' - a song entirely composed of sounds from the Disney film 'Alice in Wonderland'.  It was one of those moments where you feel you're experiencing something special.



Looking at his work is not only inspiring from a creative standpoint.  In these times of copyright/pirate warfare, Pogo seems to be giving massive corporations the finger, and getting away with it!  Read on...


Pogo (Nick Bertke) is an electronic music artist living in Perth, Western Australia. He creates music by taking chords, bass notes and vocal samples from a film, and sequencing the sounds together.  This sampling-and-remixing method of making music was first made popular in the 90's by House music producer and UK Garage influence Todd Edwards, but Pogo brought a new dimension to it by creating awesome electronic tunes from children's cartoons.

'Alice' is his most famous track (it's gotten nearly 5,000,000 views on YouTube) and since then Pogo has worked his way through the Disney films, producing tracks from 'Mary Poppins', 'The Sword in the Stone', 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang', and most recently 'Snow White' ('Wishery').




Interestingly, off the back of this "plagiarism", Disney/Pixar, contacted him and commissioned him to compose a track from their film 'Up'.  The condition was that he remove his previous Disney mixes from public view.  Nick adhered, and produced 'Upular', plus two more commissioned mixes from 'Toy Story' ('Toyz Noize' and 'Buzzwing').  When his contract with Disney ended, the old Disney mixes were made public again ;D  Which is great, because personally I think these commissions pale beside his self-inspired work.  (I quite like this one from TV series 'Dexter').



Not everyone is as sympathetic as Disney though.  When Pogo released 'Bangarang' - featuring footage and sound samples from 'Hook', Sony Pictures Entertainment freaked out.  Pogo responded, saying:

"My work serves as free viral marketing to the organisations that own the films I sample from. It's high time the music industry pulls its head out of its ass, and realises that today's remix culture is an asset, not a liability. To shoot down the potential here would be utterly illogical."

He removed the video, but several YouTube users protested by uploading their own, previously saved versions of it (the same had previously been done for 'Alice').  Amazingly, the outcry was loud enough to convince Sony that they had made a mistake, and 'Bangarang' was returned to YouTube within weeks.



Another commission came Pogo's way in the form of 'Pirates Of The Caribbean'.  He regards the mix as one of his best, but Jerry Bruckheimer Films decided they want nothing to do with it.  On his blog, Pogo says:

"The sad reality is, Swashbuckle was contracted work. I’d literally have to start saving the money that Disney would sue me before making the decision to upload it. But who knows? It might just come to that. My music is my mark in this world. If I have to pay to watch it entertain millions of people, then so be it."

What a cool guy.

He continues to inspire fans, who often make tribute videos to him, which he acknowledges and applauds on his blog.



And want to hear something that will make you sick?  He was born in 1988.  I need to find some more late bloomers ;)

I highly recommend checking out his website, where all of his tracks are availbale for download as mp3s.

Disney and Dalí make movie

When I first read about this I presumed it was a joke! But in truth, in 1946, Salvador Dali and Walt Disney started to make a cartoon together.

Choosing a Mexican love ballad as the theme, the pair created drawings, paintings and storyboards for a film which, had it been completed, would probably have been an amazing surrealist fairytale. But after a few months the infant film was shelved. Disney's studio stated financial trouble as the reason.

Dalí had already made two short films with Luis Buñuel, and was working on Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound", when he approached Disney at a Warner Brother's dinner party. He held Disney in high esteem, stating: "I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists - the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney." Dalí believed he and Disney could create "the first motion picture of the Never Seen Before."

Though the collaboration might seem strange today (the current Disney empire is far from subversive), Walt Disney was actually a progressive innovator. Six years previously he had made "Fantasia" - a groundbreaking series of beautiful animations set to classical music. Like many things that are ahead of its time, it wasn't received well, and was a massive commercial failure. I suspect it was partially due to "Fantasia" that the company's execs decided to pull the plug on the Disney-Dalí collaboration, after a mere 15 seconds of footage had been created.

53 years later, when "Fantasia" had been hailed as a work of genius, and was being remastered, Walt Disney's nephew Roy Edward Disney, unearthed the dormant Disney-Dali project. He decided to bring it back to life, and a team of Disney animators finished what Dalí started. The result is "Destino": the six-minute journey of a beautiful ballerina through a strange desert land.

Researching this has opened a kettle of fish on Disney himself, but I'll leave my findings on him for another post!

Thanks to Rosa Maria at http://blogillustratus.blogspot.com/ for making me aware of "Destino".

"DESTINO"



DALÍ'S DREAM SEQUENCE IN "SPELLBOUND"