Monday, October 29, 2007

Bob O.

About ten years ago I caught Bob Ostertag and Mike Patton at the Bottom Of The Hill in San Francisco, and it was beautiful chaos.

The avant-noise composer has been making soundscapes on the fringes of the recording industry for years, and his latest work is more of the same bizarre and brilliant electronic collages. His latest, w00t, is a collage of computer game music and sounds. I'll let him tell you about it:


w00t. def: l337 l33t awesome awesomeness bag of crap balls cool counter cult excitement exclamation f00 fox ftw fuck fun fw00t h4x0r geek great happiness happy hello hits hooray hurray huzzah internet j00 jell-o joy l00t lleet lemurs lewt lol omg own ownage owned poo pwn pwned pwnage pwning rofl score shit squee sweet swoot weet wewt wicked w0ot wo0t woo woohoo woop wootage wootfox wootmas wow yay yeah yes zomg

The w00t music began as the sound for Special Forces, a live cinematic performance by Living Cinema (Pierre Hébert and Bob Ostertag), which addressed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

In March of 2006, I put all my recordings to which I owned the rights (14 CDs) up for free download from
this site. w00t is my first release to skip the CD-for-sale stage and go directly to free Internet download, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Please download, copy, send to your friends, remix, mutilate, and mash-up. And please support this attempt to build free culture by sending a link for w00t to your friends. w00t consists of a 50-minute sound collage, a 4.5 minute sound “trailer,” and associated “cover art.” There is, however, no cover. w00t is a free, internet-only release. w00t was composed entirely from fragments of music from these computer games:

Balloon Fight • Congo Bongo • Contra • Earthbound • Halo: Combat Evolved • Ico • Katamari Damacy • Killer Instinct • The Legend of Zelda • Massive Assault • Myst • Star Fox • Super Metroid • Super Smash Bros.: Melee • Viewtiful Joe • WarioWare, Inc: Mega Party Game$ • World of Warcraft

Images from these same games were included in the w00t art work.

How butch is that? Radiohead may get the media spotlight for their album, but guys like Bob Ostertag have made serious digital strides and artistic risk. Get the full composition here, or if you need a small primer on the man's work, check out his collaborations.

Between Science and Garbage (Pierre Hébert/Bob Ostertag), Parts 1 and 2




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