millsworks

I found this over on BoingBoing and I know it’s just an ad for BBC Radio but it caught it my eye for a number of reasons.

Wouldn’t it just be so fucking cool if we had a time machine and could pull a Bill & Ted by bringing together collections of the best talents (in any field, not just music) to create collaborations we could only dream of in our lesser techno-magically enabled reality. Who doesn’t want to trip back to New York before December 1980 and get John to go with Paul for a surprise visit to SNL?

Alas, we don’t have time travel – we just have really fucking cool computer tech. To paraphrase the Six Million Dollar Man intro “We have the technology, let’s abuse it.” We might not be able to draw together these performers in the flesh but we can certainly render digital compilations which can, at the very least, give us a glimpse of what might have been. Harking back to the Beatles once more, they did something similar in 1995 by working together again on Free As A Bird, blending the voices of the still extant Fab with the departed John, courtesy of the ministrations of Jeff Lynne.

I recall in the late ’70′s a bootleg tape came out that had Elvis Presley and Linda Rondstadt singing a duet of Love Me Tender. It sounded great. It was wonderous. It was magical. The problem was, if I recall correctly, it was made from the masters of their original recordings without permission for public release – as a demonstration of what the new emerging recording technologies could do with control over pitch and timing of audio recordings. I heard on Q107 here in Toronto over a period of 2 days before it was yanked.

Since then such things have become old hat. We’ve had Natalie Cole sing duets with her father Nat King Cole; Bono, Robbie Williams and a host of others singing along with Frank Sinatra; and a whole lot more.

As I said, it’s not just limited to music. Famous actors, long dead and gone, are still turning in performances on the screen. Oliver Reed and Brandon Lee each finished their film work after dying during production. Laurence Olivier turned up as the villain Professor Totenkopf in Sky Captain. Humphrey Bogart and Alfred Hitchcock showed up for Robert Zemekis in an episode of Tales From The Crypt.

This sort of shit goes on all the time now.

It’s a far cry from the flurry of excitement elicited over the 1969 release of The Masked Marauders. Yeah – it wasn’t really them – but I still love that album and I play it on my iPod, thank you very fucking much. And it was a great idea.

I was struck many years ago when watching the AFI honours for Henry Fonda when they showed the obligatory montage at the height of the evening, running through clips from all his onscreen performances – and you saw a young man grow up in front of your eyes. Fuck off, Benjamin Button, this was the real deal. A life in time captured in images.

The memory of human beings is a changed thing as a result of recording technologies. We have become very different creatures from what we once were.

As our tech evolves with us – and becomes increasingly a part of us – we will change even further. We may never achieve the immortality sought within the shrouded mysteries of Kurzweil’s Singularity – but our perception of time and life and death itself will be forever altered as we continue to step back in time or draw the past into our present as if the formerly impenetrable veil of time was forever rent and we were physically capable of stepping with ease from thence to hence.

It’s not time travel – but it’s pretty fucking close – and you just know the music will rock.

Cheers.