Having played together countless times and knowing France’s premiere mashup DJ for well over a decade, DJ Zebra is finally part of Orchestra of Samples! DJ Zebra is singer-songwriter and musician Antoine Minnie. He’s most famous for being France’s leading mashup artist and one of the pillars of the bootleg / mashup scene worldwide – alongside DJs like Partyben, DJ Earworm and Addictive TV’s own Mark Vidler aka Go Home Productions.
October 2017 and we were asked to play at computer game Dota2’s All Star Weekend in Manila, The Philippines, at the huge Mall of Asia Arena. Alongside gamers competing with each other and artists from rapper Travie McCoy to New York dance act Kinjaz, we performed to the crowd, cutting-up Dota2 and at one point were joined by Travie McCoy himself who scratched on our Dota2 remix with us!
It’s October 2017 and we’re working on an amazing project with blind sitar master Baluji Shrivastav, funded by Unlimited – the arts body who support projects by disabled artists. Baluji also heads the UK’s only blind ensemble of musicians, the Inner Vision Orchestra, some members of which who’ve also taken part in our Orchestra of Samples project, including Baluji himself.
As Midge Ure from Ultravox once famously sang “ohhhhh Vienna”… well, what a beautiful city. We hadn’t been for quite a few years, but last week we were in Vienna, performing Orchestra of Samples at the Playground Festival there, we were joined on stage by percussionist Simon Neuwirth, who really knew how to get rhythms out of his djembe!
Early January 2017 and we were performing Orchestra of Samples in Colombia, in the beautiful South American tropical coastal city of Cartagena for a special event organised by the Lux Festival. The event was held…
We were asked to perform Orchestra of Samples in Colombia’s coastal city of Cartagena in early January 2017 and having known a number of very talented Colombians in the UK and France, the huge South American country was…
One of the occasions in Orchestra of Samples where lyrics have been especially written for a track created from improvised samples, Joe Publik – who’s travelled almost as much as we have – instantly understood and… connected with the project and it was great working with him.
Time to record some more vocals! Last year in East London we supported afrobeat group Yaaba Funk and their friends, including the incredible trumpet player Byron Wallen and singer Helen McDonald.
Summer 2016 and we performed Orchestra of Samples in the UK city of Leicester for the Journeys Festival, who’d introduced us to Iranian percussionist, composer and producer Arian Sadr, who performed the show with us. So given a…
May 2016 and we were in China for some dates, including performing at the opening of the GMIC16, the Global Mobile Internet Conference, in (quite incredibly) the Bird’s Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing (watch the video below) and at Club Tango, also in the capital.
In July 2015 we headed to Poland to perform Orchestra of Samples at the Visegrad Wave Festival, which is also known as Festiwal Z Wiejskiego Podwórza (and roughly translates as the countryside or rural yard festival). It takes place in the beautiful town of Czeremcha in East Poland…,
June 2015 saw us play at the Sonidos Liquidos festival in Lanzarote, in the Spanish Canary Islands. While there we were introduced to Toñín Corujo, who plays timple (pronoucned timp-lay) – a traditional Canarian small guitar-like instrument from the ukulele family.
An inspirational and innovative musical force to so many, including ourselves, Stereolab’s front woman Laetitia Sadier was a natural choice to approach to be part of Orchestra of Samples and working with her was a joy.
After knowing the guys from Italian AV act Frank Sent Us for more than a decade, and having played at many festivals together, often one of us supporting the other, we’d still never collaborated or actually performed together!
Never away long from Paris, November 2014 saw us head back to the French capital for a weeklong artist-in-residence with the digital arts venue MISS – the Maison de l’Image et du Signe de Sevran. Over the week we filmed a couple of…
An Orchestra of Samples recording session with a difference! We spent a long and facinating day recording 80’s icons Wang Chung and their musical inventor friend and Bjork collaborator Henry Dagg and his Sharpsichord! It was the 1980’s and UK band Wang Chung had their massive hit Dance Hall Days, but outside the UK the band had even greater success in the USA with a string of Top 40 hits. Interestingly, their name means “yellow bell” in Chinese and is the first note in the Chinese classical music scale.
The Beatbox Collective – are a group of top UK beatbox talent, many of them award winners in their respective styles, who all came together to form one high impact and energetic collective! Originally formed in 2011 when they were commissioned by the Shambala Festival to create an exclusive main stage performance, they’ve since gained members, doing the rounds at UK festivals, including Glastonbury, Bestival and Lovebox to name a few. With the group, never are two shows the same and often the line-up of beatboxers is different. For this recording session we had to pleasure of filming four of them…
After filming musicians in more than 25 countries, we’re now recording sessions on home turf! So headed to Islington in London to spend the day with some of the amazing Inner Vision Orchestra, whose members are all blind! The brain child of blind Indian maestro Baluji Shrivastav, he’s brought together musicians from around the world, with the aim of proving that music really does have the power to transform lives – especially for people without sight, as sound is their way of interacting with the world. The orchestra play everything from Western classical to Indian and world music, some members even played at the London 2012 Paralympic Closing Ceremony.
We’re always looking for artists playing unusual instruments to be part of the project, and recently met up with London based Italian artist Bruno Zamborlin, who’s invented a device called Mogees which turns everyday objects into unique musical instruments!
Orchestra of Samples is about music without borders, and in early 2014 the Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival commissioned us to record Northumbrian and Scottish musicians for a performance of the project at their September ‘border crossing’ themed festival, tying in with the vote on Scottish independence.
June 2014, and while performing Orchestra of Samples at the Timitar music festival in Agadir, Morocco, the festival organised a recording session for us at the local Jazzawiya studios, where many international artists have rehearsed – including, at one time, the legend Bob Marley himself! Guitarist Oussama Belmamoune, from the band Mehdi Nassouli, who were headlining that night at the festival, introduced us to a number of his amazing musician friends who we recorded for the project – including himself, who we recorded first.
May 2014 and we were in St Petersburg, Russia, performing ‘Orchestra of Samples’ at the Erarta Contemporary Art Museum for the Cross Art Festival. While there we hooked up with our old friend, the brilliant electronic artist Ilya Baramia (Илья Барамия) who we first worked with…
Le Hangar, the excellent venue in the Ivry suburbs of Paris, recently began their first ever artists-in-residence programme and we had the wonderful pleasure of being their very first, with Orchestra of Samples. The residency allowed us to work with young musicians from both Le Hangar’s music school and the Music Conservatoire of Ivry.
November 2013 and while on a project in Epinal, France, we took the chance to head up the snowy roads of the Vosges Mountains to find Christophe Toussaint, a musician who builds and plays a rather unusual traditional French instrument called the Epinette de Vosges. A beautiful sounding kind of harp, he’s built more than 3000 of them…
