This sounds v bizarre but also pretty cool...

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...891598,00.html

White Stripes go classical at Royal Opera House

Paul Arendt
Tuesday October 10, 2006
The Guardian

The Royal Opera House is to stage a new ballet inspired by the White Stripes. Choreographer Wayne McGregor is creating the as-yet-untitled performance using avant-garde orchestral arrangements of White Stripes tracks.
McGregor's source is a new classical album called Aluminium, due for release next month, which features 10 orchestral arrangements of familiar White Stripes tracks. The arrangements were created by composer Joby Talbot, a former member of indie rockers the Divine Comedy.

According to Talbot, the idea for the record came from Richard Russell, the founder of the White Stripes' record label, XL Recordings. "He was musing about that old tradition of doing instrumental versions of rock songs, and wondering why it doesn't happen any more," Talbot told the Guardian. "When you put the two worlds of orchestral and rock music together, you normally end up with this bland, anaemic Muzak. Our aim was to avoid that at all costs. Some of the songs sound like lost soundtracks to bizarre silent movies from the 20s. Others are like outtakes from a John Ford western - and some are just beautiful, mesmeric chill-out music. Hopefully it's uncharacterisable."
Talbot says that the band's frontman Jack White gave the project his blessing after hearing three of the tracks. "Jack thought it was fantastic, and was going on about what a great honour it was. He had one stipulation, which was that we weren't allowed to move to a posher studio. We had to do the whole thing in Wapping."

The album will be released as a limited edition of 3,333 CDs and 999 LPs, although it will also be available for download. (The number three is a recurring motif for the White Stripes, appearing in album artwork, sleeve notes and inspiring the three colours - red, white and black - that Jack and Meg White wear on stage.)

Three of the Talbot/Stripes arrangements - Aluminum, The Hardest Button to Button and Blue Orchid - will appear in McGregor's ballet, along with four of Talbot's own chamber-music compositions. John Pawson, the minimalist architect, is designing the stage sets.

Best known as the founder and artistic director of the acclaimed Random Dance Company, McGregor has worked with a wide range of international companies, from La Scala in Milan to the National Theatre. He also recently provided choreography for the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

The ballet will premiere at Covent Garden in November. Talbot says he is "hoping it will motivate the Covent Garden orchestra to blow some cobwebs out of their instruments and really go for it".

www.alumiiinium.com
www.myspace.com/alumiiinium
www.xlrecordings.com
www.richardgoodallgallery.com
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl...tral_Treatment

__________________
"Moderate intoxication includes additional abnormalities such as hyperactive bowel sounds,"

A ballet now? Odd but cool. I wonder what Jack and Meg think of all of this.

yet again jack white makes me randy

Sunday, November 19 2006, 23:59 UTC - by David Cribb
Music by The White Stripes is being used by the Royal Ballet in a new show.

Songs by the band have been used by ex-Divine Comedy composer Joby Talbot in a new opera, Chroma.

The Stripes have now given their permission for the production to continue utilising the material.

Talbot told the BBC: “The music was not a gimmick in an attempt to draw in non-ballet fans, but Wayne McGregor (choreographer) had simply decided it was the perfect music for his piece.”

The show, which opened this week, continues until November 29.

I can't imagine it..

I have tried..

The Four Temperaments Triple Bill
Royal Ballet @ Royal Opera House, London: 17, 18, 22, 27, 29 November 2006



Edward Watson (credit: Bill Cooper) At 7.25 on Friday evening, anticipation mixed with excitement mixed with concern in the Royal Opera House auditorium.

Forget The Sound of Music - this was the hottest ticket in town, not least for the world premieres of two highly anticipated new works.

Chroma, with choreography by Wayne McGregor and designs by John Pawson, more interestingly boasts a score from The White Stripes, reorchestrated by Joby Talbot, sometime stalwart of The Divine Comedy.

On paper, it did not look promising - one of those foolish genre fusions that is usually consigned to either the 'if only' file or the 'complete waste of time' file after its premiere - and the Royal Ballet regulars looked as awkward with the concept as the White Stripes fans looked awkward just to be there.
Half an hour later, and the thunderous audience reception suggested that the performance had gone better than most expected. Indeed, it turned out to be one of the most exciting premieres of any art-form that London has seen this year. Chroma is a glorious and highly articulate piece of theatre, with astounding choreography matching a percussive, almost mechanically rhythmic score.

Article continues



McGregor's use of bodily distortion is ever-present, but is here transformed into a new harmonic language. With all the painful postures, awkward manoeuvres and unorthodox routines required of the dancers, McGregor manages to avoid even the essence of ugliness. Rather, the choreography seems to emancipate the body; to discover a completely new freedom of the limbs that is then manipulated and distorted itself. The minimalist white backdrop and drained costumes only add to the tension and thrill of the dancing.

The other premiere, if not as surprising as Chroma, provided a heart-stopping end to the evening. Danse à grande vitesse uses Michael Nyman's 1993 composition of a similar title as a basis for exploring the idea of movement, and it does so with the most tremendous imagination. The most heart-stopping moment comes at the very end, when Nyman's score ends on a crushing climax but the choreography continues in complete silence; the dancers seemingly suspended in a hushed, timeless void. It is rare to see two world premieres on one night, and even rarer for them both to work, but I sense that both will be returning next season and for many more after that. In between, Balanchine's classic The Four Temperaments seemed rather like an anti-climax. The finale in particular did not excite in the way it normally does, while the solo piano of Henry Roche hacked away with no sense of purpose.

However, here and throughout the evening, the soloists were excellent. In Chroma I was particularly impressed with the black dancer, Eric Underwood, who explored McGregor's flexible, almost feminine male choreography with a secure Classical technique. In the Balanchine, the three opening themes were flawless, while Viacheslav Samodurov characterised excellently, for all the heaviness of his landings. Judging by the curtain calls, I was the only one there not overly impressed by Carlos Acosta, who seemed to be living on his reputation a little too much. However, he partnered an effervescent Darcey Bussell, who also impressed in DGV with the most delicate, poignantly fragile dancing.

Edward Watson looked shattered by this third work, having danced in all three, but his movement remained of the highest quality throughout. His solo with an especially sultry quartet of girls in The Four Temperaments showed a complete ease in the air. In DGV Zenaida Yanowsky was exceptional, while Frederico Bonelli entered with purpose and inhabited the stage.

The conducting of Richard Bernas was adequate. Cowbells lagged behind the beat in Chroma, as did untuned percussion in the thanklessly minimalist third work. However, the orchestra provided fine accompaniment, and nothing more was needed in this instance. Director Monica Mason should be proud of herself.

- Dave Paxton

Stevie Chick recently interviewed Richard Russell and Joby Talbot about the inspiration behind Aluminium, as well as discussing the recording and artwork with them. Watch the full interview here:
http://www.alumiiinium.com/interview/



The interview was filmed at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden which was also the venue for Wayne McGregor's new ballet which was set to three tracks by Aluminium.

The ballet opened last Friday and was reviewed on the front page of Saturday's Guardian. The review is linked below, although you may need to register to read the review - and please note that Joby Talbot was not in fact in Joy Division.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/stor...951349,00.html



The Aluminium store has now been moved, the few remaining copies of the CD are available for sale through the XL Online Store.
Click here to visit the XL Store

The LP has sold out.

The digital version of the album is now available through all major download services:
iTunes
eMusic
TuneTribe
7digital

The final batch of Aluminium orders that were placed through the original Aluminium store shipped at the end of last week. And please note that the LPs have shipped separately to the CDs.

All the best,

Aluminium.



For more information, please visit:

www.alumiiinium.com
www.myspace.com/alumiiinium
www.xlrecordings.com

In the Royal Ballet's hyped triple bill, a classic proved fresher than the premières

It was the evening that the White Stripes came to the Royal Ballet - or at least their music did, in a slick arrangement by the classical composer and one-time member of the Divine Comedy Joby Talbot. The event on 17 November was one of the most hungrily anticipated ballet nights of the year - and yet, for dance fans, that had more to do with the two important premières of the night, by the young British choreographers Wayne McGregor and Christopher Wheeldon. Whisper it: dance fans may have heard pop music before; what's more, they may be used to experiencing pop paired with dance steps. After all, Michael Clark, to mention just one name, has been putting ballet-derived choreography together with punk for longer than 20 years.
Chroma is McGregor's ballet to music by the White Stripes and from the new orchestral album by Talbot and Richard Russell, Alumi nium. Ten stars of the Royal Ballet, in off-white costumes, were contained in an unadorned white box by the minimalist architect John Pawson. They seemed to become architectural elements in themselves, but with their wild, angular movements kicking against and disrupting the still centre of Pawson's blank edifice. The visceral whirl of the music pumped up the adrenaline - although Christopher Austin's orchestrations sounded more like a 1970s film score than anything to scare the Swan Lake-loving ladies in the stalls. At times filmy and boneless, at other moments pointed and fiercely articulated, this was choreography that had its audience in thrall.
There was luxury casting: Federico Bonelli, Alina Cojocaru, Tamara Rojo and Edward Watson, as well as the up-and-coming stars Sarah Lamb and Lauren Cuthbertson. Cojocaru's strong, spider-web fragility was beautifully displayed in Talbot's ethereal "Transit of Venus", the penultimate sequence before the whole ensemble brought the piece crashing to its close. For dancers whose seasons are dominated by classical revivals, this piece was new and exciting territory - so much so, perhaps, that they rather charmingly fluffed their curtain call, almost unheard of in the perfectly graceful, utterly flawless world of classical ballet.
The problem with sandwiching a modern classic between two premières is that it tends to invite unfair comparisons. George Balanchine's Four Temperaments still looked completely fresh, almost 60 years to the day after its own première on 20 November 1946. Some critics see The Four Temperaments as even more significant for choreographic modernism than the first performance of The Rite of Spring on 29 May 1913. Whereas Nijinsky's steps for the Stravinsky masterpiece created a sort of anti-ballet, a cul-de-sac for the art form's progress, The Four Temperaments pointed the way forward. From the vantage point of today, it looks like the first room in an enfilade of developments, from Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham and beyond.
As the title suggests, the work is based on the idea of the four humours: melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic and choleric, which make for variations of contrasting moods. Watson, all feet and hands, magnetic in his stage presence, made witty work of the phlegmatic variation. But this is also a piece about ensemble, beautifully made, punctuated with enormous care and skill such that its structure is generously opened out for the audience's pleasure.
The finale of the triple bill was the second première of the night - DGV, for 26 dancers, by Christopher Wheeldon. This Somerset-born choreographer, born in 1973, started out as a dancer with the Royal Ballet. In 1993, however, he was invited to join the New York City Ballet, the company co-founded by Balanchine. Choreography gradually took over from dancing, and Wheeldon is now regarded as one of the great hopes for ballet's future.
DGV stands for Danse à Grande Vitesse. Michael Nyman wrote the score - Musique à Grande Vitesse - for the inauguration of the TGV north European line, and it was first performed in Lille in 1993. Jean-Marc Puissant's design is a metallic structure, elements bolted together as if it were the aluminium shell of a plane. The piece, it turns out, seems to be about the strangely suspended experience of travel, Nyman's score pumping out a relentless pulse that culminates in a deafening tattoo on drums from the side of the stage as the work powers through to its des tination. Zenaida Yanowsky's almost queenly presence dominated the start of the work, somehow conveying that she might be swooping at speed through galaxies rather than moving, as in fact she was, with slow, elegant poise. By the end, the dancers were spinning like tops; this had been as much a journey of the imagination as a dance about speed.
Royal Opera House, London WC2

http://www.newstatesman.com/200612040039