After finding the Nathan “Flutebox” Lee video at Google London on Facebook, I decided to look more in depth at how classic instruments are being brought into the modern era either by fusion or playing them in completely new ways. Let’s take a brief look shall we? So first, here’s the original Flutebox video that sparked me on this little detour–flutebox is up through the beginning of the third minute, then a guy named Beardyman does some wicked beatboxing and mimicry for a while before flutebox gets in on the act for the final song:
So those first 3 minutes sparked my interest in fluteboxing and trying to find more of it. I found some videos of it on youtube but they weren’t as good as Nathan. I mean, still very impressive, but I can tell than Nathan has been doing this for a fair while and has taken quite a bit of time to hone his craft. I decided to focus on finding more about Nathan and all I could really come up with is his myspace page–nothing out of the ordinary here: dates/locations for upcoming performances (dang, nothing in the states), and the usual myspace menagerie of bad web design. Then I found “Belly of the Beast,” a rap song featuring Nathan “fluteboxing” and some sweet tabla drummin’…feast your ears:
So now it gets more interesting…I started thinking about what other crossover or musical explorers I’ve encountered recently. Two immediately came to mind–cellist Rufus Cappadocia and guitarist Kaki King. My first encounter with Cappadocia was this TED conference performance:
As you can see, everything starts out calmly enough but it REALLY gets interesting around the 1:30 mark. This other song called “Transformation” from Rufus in on my work “in the zone” playlist:
I’ve know about Kaki King through some of her more popular works for a couple of years now, but I had no idea until recently that she was behind the “Bari Improv” song from the awful movie August Rush. Here’s a pretty good performance from her at TED:
As you can see, it’s a another interesting “slap the string instrument” type of performance. While I was composing this, Felicia Day tweeted about Zoe Keating, an “avant cellist” who sounds like she is straight out of the tech world which is interesting (may engineers are also musicians–I used to be one but have long since played any of my instruments).
Interesting eh? So in closing, I bring us back to the original spark of this detour through musical entanglement: the flute. A site called “Smoking Section” lists out the top 5 hip-hop songs with a flute in them. They missed a favorite of mine–Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot” (due to the corporate greed of the music companies or possibly some other reason, you’ll have to click through the video to watch on Youtube until I post up the video here in jw player):
Popularity: 33% [?]
