Antiquated hardware used to masterfully remix Radiohead's Nude

It takes some serious game to rise above the legions of mediocre DIYers out there and stand tall as a true legend. Judging by the video posted up after the cut, James Houston can now consider himself one of the elite. Somehow, this cat managed to tackle the nearly impossible task of remixing Radiohead's Nude without defacing it entirely (read: merging bits and pieces of the tune into a 4/4 arrangement and calling it a day). Instead, he utilized a host of aging hardware (Sinclar ZX Spectrum, Epson LX-81 dot matrix printer, HP Scanjet 3c, etc.) to create a rendition that even Yorke could admire. For fans of In Rainbows and mesmerizing music videos alike, there's a must-see waiting just below.

[Via Hack-A-Day, thanks Eliot]


Big Ideas (Don't get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.

[Das Boot @ Jun 6th 2008 11:56AM]

This may totally sound like a stupid question, but what is that? i've always used CD's and MP3 players. looks like something from the 80's.

[melloncollie @ Jun 6th 2008 1:09PM]

Be you troll?

[Kris @ Jun 6th 2008 11:59AM]

Just posting here so I can get the link to my profile since Engadget's website doesn't have a link ANYWHERE (was any usability testing done to this place? bah)

[Reader @ Jun 6th 2008 1:39PM]

If you had been here longer you would have known they addressed that the last time they revamped their site, but said it was currently impossible (or too difficult, I forget which) to do. Just favorite your profile if you must.

[Kris @ Jun 10th 2008 1:15PM]

That's dumb and not a valid excuse.

[roflercopterer @ Jun 6th 2008 11:59AM]

Okay.

Okay.

What?

[OneLove @ Jun 6th 2008 4:44PM]

Is this from a Mario Bros game?

[nak @ Jun 6th 2008 12:00PM]

Epson LX-81 and ScanJet 3c? Cause like, at the end of the video it shows an LX-86 and SJ 4c.

[giuliop @ Jun 6th 2008 12:41PM]

Usual "Engangret" approximation.

[Mike @ Jun 6th 2008 2:12PM]

I think now that they just put in errors just to have something to laugh at around the virtual watercooler.

[Gilbert Tang @ Jun 6th 2008 2:17PM]

They got the information directly from the source. Before you give Engadget crap why don't you check the link included with the video?

Or are you one of these people who believes everything he sees?

[Gilbert Tang @ Jun 6th 2008 2:19PM]

I should also point out that Engadget referenced the equipment they used for the rendition, NOT the video.

[giuliop @ Jun 6th 2008 2:31PM]

It's just that you could copy & paste from the text, but not from the video. I bet they didn't even notice the discrepancy.
If you know Engadget, you know it's always best to double check. Or are you one of these people who believes everything he sees?

[Gilbert Tang @ Jun 6th 2008 3:00PM]

So I guess the direct source, the source that made the video, the source that published it to the web, the source that wrote the copy on the site, the source that procured the actual equipment must be wrong. All that fact checking I learned in school must have been for naught.

I stand corrected.

[bolezhinkov @ Jun 6th 2008 3:15PM]

that was a long exchange for a detail that others might consider trivial. good eye though.

[DSeaver @ Jun 6th 2008 12:01PM]

I, for one, have to say that is amazing. Great song and even greater remix.

[phanbouy @ Jun 6th 2008 1:09PM]

yeah this was major ass kickage

it's like In Rainbows meets a long lost Ultima soundtrack. plus vintage gear.

[superted @ Jun 6th 2008 5:28PM]

thank god some one actually appreciates how amazing this is... the comments above are typical youtube style crap


i like vimeo, they seem to have the flickr community's approach - just decent friendly and arty people doing stuff like this

[soul7963 @ Jun 6th 2008 12:02PM]

Amazing! Too much time on his hands but amazing.

[James Lim @ Jun 6th 2008 12:02PM]

what are you talking about the cassette?

[Das Boot @ Jun 6th 2008 12:06PM]

is that what they're called? Cassettes? yeap, definately 80's.

[Matt @ Jun 6th 2008 12:27PM]

You're joking, right? Since I used cassettes through about half of the 90s as well. And there's no way yo don't even know what it is...well...unless you're ten.

It feels very weird that the 80s are now considered ancient history to most high school students. That's was nearly half my life!

[gad get @ Jun 6th 2008 1:13PM]

@ Matt

The math isn't adding up, here. If you were in your low twenties (as indicated by your statement that the decade of the '80s, i.e., a period of ten years, was almost half your life) then that would put your birth in the middle of the '80s, that decade in which nearly half your life took place. This means that when you say that nearly half your life consisted of the '80s, you must mean that the latter half of the '80s made up half your life. This, of course, would have to mean that you are in fact not in your twenties at all, but are instead somewhere around ten years old. Which means that by your account of time, you are currently in the mid nineties, when the internet was just coming into public use, and are somehow communicating forward through over a dozen years of time with the denizens of 2008. Yet you have no idea that you are out of phase in space-time, or that you are looking at the gadgets of the future (to us, the present).
Or else, you have actually traveled through time yourself, and not merely communicated across a temporal barrier. Perhaps, for example, you really are in your twenties, and were born before the year 1980. You then skipped a period of about five to eight years sometime between 1990 and 2008, to end up in your low twenties now, despite being born at least twenty-eight years ago.

I'm sorry, I need to rest my mind...

[Neg2LED @ Jun 6th 2008 6:01PM]

gad get:

o_O you think too much :P

[tf @ Jun 6th 2008 12:04PM]

simply amazing

[tf @ Jun 6th 2008 12:21PM]

seriously, i've watched this 5 times already.
i can't get over the awsomeness.
it's even filmed perfectly.

[404 @ Jun 6th 2008 12:05PM]

Hey Engagdet, the gear in the video is labeled "Epson LX-86" and "HP Scanjet 4c". What gives?

Those HDD speakers sound rather scary.

[bsm0f0 @ Jun 6th 2008 12:06PM]

disclaimer ... remove noise canceling headphones and check volume before playing ...

... OW.

[SimonRichards @ Jun 6th 2008 12:06PM]

Holy crap that's awesome

[Shane @ Jun 6th 2008 12:06PM]

Simply amazing. The hard drive bits have me confused though...Is he just directly driving the actuator coils of the drives and using them as a crude speaker? I assume he's only using the Sinclair for the synthesized music and that another machine is driving everything else behind the scenes.

[404 @ Jun 6th 2008 12:14PM]

Shane: People have figured out how to make about-legible speakers out of old hard drives.

http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm

Not sure about the exact electronics of it but that's an example.

[Bill Brasky @ Jun 6th 2008 1:56PM]

The part of the hard drive that controls the motion of the heads is actually called a voice coil. Very similar to the ones in your speakers.

[Shane @ Jun 6th 2008 3:30PM]

@404:

Thanks for the link! I dug deeper into the original articles and found the other videos of old computer hardware making music.

@Bill:

I've never actually heard that part of the drive referred to as a Voice Coil but the principles are very similar...

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/op/act.htm

Makes perfect sense that it could be hacked into an impromptu speaker. For that matter, a dynamic microphone can also be used in reverse as a speaker (though it would probably sound about as good as a hard drive used as a speaker).

[Ryan Beesley @ Jun 9th 2008 4:37PM]

I think my favorite trick of yore was the Commodore 64's 1541 floppy drive. You can make it "sing" as demonstrated in this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=5gnMgmlKi_o

I remember in the early 90's going over to a friend's house who would do this with his C64.

[Ryan Beesley @ Jun 9th 2008 4:42PM]

@shane, I can confirm that it's called a voice coil. I always found it amusing; even more so when I first saw this (ab)usage.

[lance @ Jun 6th 2008 12:15PM]

That gives a whooole new meaning to the word
ELECTRONICA

at first i thought it was going to be crap but that was cool.
how geeky is this crowd! LOL!
love it!

[Adam @ Jun 6th 2008 12:26PM]

LOL yea i was like wait is this a joke.....it didn't start until like 1:15 haha

but yea i'm definitely a geek after watching and enjoying this video

[Yevon @ Jun 6th 2008 12:15PM]

Ya know, a talking hard drive would be a cool feature to have.

"Its been a while since you've backed me up"

"I've got fragmentation up the ass here, what gives?"

"99% capacity used. Porn deletion in progress..."

[phanbouy @ Jun 6th 2008 1:11PM]

U turned me off while writing. I can haz corruption.

[ReggieXuk @ Jun 6th 2008 12:24PM]

sounded like noise.

could of mixed it down a bit.

[retro77 @ Jun 6th 2008 12:29PM]

Woah, thats pretty sweet.

[giuliop @ Jun 6th 2008 12:31PM]

It's the C.O.P.S.!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1C9Q5JheOE

[Hannah Thoreson @ Jun 6th 2008 12:38PM]

Amazing!

[ZeitgeistXIII @ Jun 6th 2008 1:26PM]

Very cool:) I need to find my old c-64. The opening music bits sounded just like the video games back then. lol

[granny down east @ Jun 6th 2008 1:41PM]

Amazing, and so gratifying. James H, kudos to you sir.
I go now to the Korg DDD-5, SQ-1 and DW-8000 to duplicate ABBA's Dancing Queen.
See you in a year.

[Gilbert Tang @ Jun 6th 2008 2:04PM]

That video was astounding.

It occurs to me everyday, often painfully given my inflated ego, that there are people out there who do it--whatever it may be--way, way better than me.

And probably you, too.

This video is a perfect example.

[slumcat @ Jun 6th 2008 4:06PM]

What gets me is that some people are doing "it" at all. The kinds of crazy creative stuff people come up with these days blows my mind. I mean, who would think to make music with a dot-matrix printer and some old hard drives? And yet, there it is, in all its spectacularly geeky glory.

[Dustin @ Jun 9th 2008 12:42AM]

Simple answer: art student looking for a job

[Chris @ Jun 6th 2008 2:07PM]

That's pretty sweet.

[Lane @ Jun 6th 2008 2:12PM]

That's awesome! I wish I could do something like that.