Foamy music by Warren Ellis
Exquisite music by Warren Ellis for a Sony ad which filled the streets of Miami with foam.
Created by the ad agency Fallon London, which also made the three previous iconic Sony advertisements – all for the Bravia flat-screen television – the ninety-second “Foam City” commercial required 16 hours of filming.
The team flooded the centre of the Florida, south east United States, city with over 460 million litres of foam, using the world’s largest foam-producing machine, which could fill an Olympic swimming pool in 24 seconds.
The commercial is being shown for the first time on European televisions today. However, it will not appear in the UK until May 1.
Directed by Simon Ratigan, it features music by Warren Ellis, of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It is advertising the new Handycam and Cybershot handheld digital video cameras.
Over 200 Miami residents were asked to frolic in the foam while capturing events on the cameras.
Tom Chivers. Telegraph. April 16, 2008
I used to romanticize Sony. I did well investing in the stock market at the end of the dot.com boom but Sony was a lead weight, I made the mistake of emotionally investing in my investments. The Walkman was a truly magical object to me: As it was to William Gibson, it was part of his inspiration for cyberspace and what became the digital age in Neuromancer.
”I had gone into a small neighborhood electronics store, never even having heard of the Walkman,” he said in an interview from Vancouver. ”They had one on display and the guy told me, ‘You’re not going to believe this.’
”I haven’t had that immediate a reaction to a piece of technology before or since. I didn’t analyze it at the time, but in retrospect, I recognized the revolutionary intimacy of the interface. For the first time I was able to move my nervous system through a landscape with my choice of soundtrack.
William Gibson, interviewed. New York Times. July 29, 1999.
Then I got caught up in the Sony creation myth, Ibuka and Morita cooking up audio tape with tarry substances on kraft paper in the rubble of bombed out buildings in post-WW2 Tokyo.
Sony disappointed me with the “walkman of words”, a hideous geiger-counter like object with ugly radioactive-green words on a tiny screen, in 1991. I held fast to the dream of a perfectly simple multi-screened device through watching e-ink’s developments in clear text on opaque flexible screens that could be read even in daylight. But then the Libri-e, only released in Japan around the turn of the millennium and later the electronic book reader, for the Western world, just seemed futile. One day I woke up and the the fairy tale was over: the nerd equivalent of no longer believing in Santa Claus. The discontinuation of the robot dog, AIBO was the final nail in the coffin. An electronic book was no longer a holy grail. I figured that if I wait a few months I’ll have an Apple phone/ Blackberryish communicator / Music player / World radio with a reasonable screen and do basic reading-for-information, or when I’m travelling, on that device and print out anything I want to savour and flip through. So I’m researching flexible ceramic spines and pages that fold in and hold, without glue, to build a bibliostructure to hold the print-outs.
When I read that Warren Ellis had been hired to do the music for an ad, then heard the music, my heart warmed a little again towards Sony. He’s an exquisitely thoughtful and intelligent composer. I don’t know much about how compositions evoke a feeling, time or place rather than illustrate it, I just respond. As a child my favourite composer was Duke Ellington, and Warren’s music seems to me to have that kind of scope, something unbounded in its curiosity and genuinely soulful. I first saw Warren perform when he played with the Bad Seeds in Los Angeles and there’s something tender, though wild, about his contributions to the band that make me think of a description I once read about early country music, that the violin was the symbol for tugging the strings of the heart.
The first piece of his own music I owned (before circling back to the Dirty Three’s albums) was a solo violin piece he wrote for my dancer friend Dana Gingras’s company, the Holy Body Tattoo. Dana spent her childhood in Buenos Aires and has a great love of Paris, where Tango music found a home when it was exiled from Argentina. The name of the dance company refers to the indelible marks that life experiences leave on the soul. (The show Circa also includes music by the Tiger Lillies.) Warren has commented on his music for Circa.
I had been approached sometime before to contribute some solo music to the project,and this recording is the result. The theme of the dance was the tango and I was asked to write music in an appropriate style. Tango is a style of music I have never attempted to play or write, and for that reason decided any attempt to try and write something in that vein would be at once dishonest and most probably insulting to a fine form of music.
So I decided to deconstruct, if you like, the elements I heard in Tango music,its percussive nature, sliding melodies, glissandos, the emotional intensity, and try to create it in a figurative way, using only the violin. I worked with the two dancers in a small studio in Paris, listening to the way their shoes slid, and improvising to the movement that they were creating for the piece.
Warren’s foamy music for Sony has the crystalline loveliness of a snowflake, with just a sharp metallic edge of something manufactured, not organic. And the wrenching melancholy of snowflakes, the fleeting beauty that dissolves in your hand the moment you touch it.
Geoff Manaugh has a post on Bldgblog about the meteorological foam we call clouds being used as an advertising medium. A recalibrated version of skywriting.
Over on LiveScience we learn that a new company has started using “a mixture of soap-based foams and lighter-than-air gases such as helium” to create “floating ads and messages” in the sky.
Unfortunately dubbed Flogos, these floating logos can be made – or printed, really – every 15 seconds by “re-purposed snow machines,” thus “flooding the air with foamy peace signs or whatever shape a client desires. Renting the machine for a day starts out at a cost of about $2,500.”
I should start blogging with it.
The sky texts aren’t particularly large, however. They’re only “about two feet long and nearly a foot wide” – but they “generally last anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on conditions in the atmosphere.”
“They will fly for miles,” their inventor adds – because they are “durable,” capable of flying as high as 20,000 feet without breaking up. Gaseous typography.
It won’t just be meteorologists watching the skies, in other words, but graphic designers. Adjusting leading, kerning the clouds, ragging atmospheres.Geoff Manaugh. Bldgblog
