Need suggestions for "moody" and "provocative" audio to play in between songs during a live performance.

August 4, 2005 3:21 PM

Need suggestions for "moody" and "provocative" audio/sources for said audio to play in between songs during a live performance.

My band is playing a show tomorrow evening and we've been collecting pieces of public domain audio (speeches by various politicians, authors, philosophers, etc.) as well as NASA audio recordings from probes and the like. We'd like to maintain the established "mood"/"ambience" (slight unease/paranoia/disconnection from reality) of the performance whilst we do boring stuff like tune our instruments. Any suggestions on sources (Public Domain) for clips appropriate for this purpose?

posted by basicchannel to Media & Arts (10 answers total)

Best answer: Old news but could well be appropriate: Numbers Stations.
posted by everichon at 3:35 PM on August 4, 2005

I'm a big fan of Bela Bartok's "Concerto For Orchestra" for spooky-sounding music that won't be immediately familiar to many people (and thus losing its impact of spookiness).
posted by NewGear at 3:42 PM on August 4, 2005

Best answer: I'm not if you can find anything moody there, but you could always hit archive.org. Not all of these recordings are in the public domain, but I'm sure the presidential recordings are open game, and you can do a search for the phrase "public domain" and see what you get.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 4:54 PM on August 4, 2005

Best answer: BBC Bloody Sunday witnesses

D-Day retellings

Air raid witnesses

JFK assassination witnesses

Nixon White House tapes
posted by 517 at 5:24 PM on August 4, 2005

There are a lot of experimental, electro-acoustic, and darker ambient type net labels under Creative Commons licenses.
Here are a few, you can find more at archive.org:

EarLabs

Conv

adozen

and here's another good source for looking up more net labels.
posted by p3t3 at 6:08 PM on August 4, 2005

Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony, third movement, is really unsettling to hear. Spooky, political, agitated, yes. The LSO has an audio sample of it in .wax format (?) -- I don't know if there's any other way to listen to it online.
posted by oldtimey at 6:50 PM on August 4, 2005

Whatever plays before Tool goes on stage is always pretty incredible. No earthly idea what it is though or how free it is.
posted by sublivious at 8:04 PM on August 4, 2005

Are you looking for music or non-music?

If you're looking for music-ish sounds, I'd suggest Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works Vol. II"... beautiful, textured, and weird. Also, you can dip into it and out of it almost anywhere and it'll work.
posted by BoringPostcards at 11:52 PM on August 4, 2005

Response by poster: Thank you very much! Every single comment has proven helpful!
posted by basicchannel at 12:14 AM on August 5, 2005

ennio morricone
posted by Satapher at 3:15 AM on August 5, 2005