«
»


GamelanX

GamelanX is a San Francisco Bay Area collective headed by composer Eric ‘EO’ Oberthaler. They created a beautiful, original piece just for TED, collaborating with a dance troupe from Philadelphia called ArcheDream, who use black light and perform in elaborate Indonesian masks and costumes, aided by invisible ‘Ninjas’ who perform magical lifts and animate flying silk butterflies. They took full advantage of the massive stage at our new digs in Long Beach—this would never have been possible in Monterey. The piece was the mesmerising ‘Spiral Flower’, featuring a mysterious obligato piano part, woven inside and out by a haunting female soprano, with their two gamalan virtuosos chiming gently over the top. Simply gorgeous.

I’ve been too lame to figure Yesenia’s camera out, but TEDster David Geller said I could use his shots!

gamalanx

Gamelan X

archedream-at-ted09

ArcheDream

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 8:52 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “GamelanX”

  1. heretic says:
    February 6, 2009 at 10:21 am

    Looks simply amazing and I bet it sounded just as good. Hope there is some video available of it.

    Cheers,
    Andrew

  2. mizmusic says:
    February 6, 2009 at 6:31 pm

    Thank you so much for your wonderful descriptions, Thomas!
    You really craft words to capture the essence of the music. I can
    practically hear it…Gamelan music is, I think, an acquired taste
    which I haven’t quite acquired yet! ;) Such unusual notes…

    And thanks to Mr. Geller for his ‘borrowed’, amazing photos!
    Arrghhh, technology…a person practically needs a degree in
    rocket science to figure these gadgets out, and you are about the
    most UNlame person I can imagine, there, Mr. Robertson. :)
    I’ll doubtless have the same problem when I get around to
    buying myself a digital camera, but I have research to do first…

    Rule of thumb: when the instruction manual is bigger than the
    gadget, anticipate a stress headache. ;)

    Peace and (mega)pixels <–note attempted alliteration (sp?)
    Krazy Kara