You might recall from your childhood the song “Teddy Bears’ Picnic”, a classic that starts with the lyric, “If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise,” referring to the uncanny spectacle of autonomous teddy bears indulging in some al fresco dining. But that opening line could equally be used to describe the new release from music label experimenters Really.
Really’s project Out of the Woods, part of their Naturally Digital series, takes the idea of downloading music while sitting at home or on the daily commute and loses it in the forest. Namely, Grunewald forest near Berlin, which the collective has used to host six tracks hidden in six logs from six different artists—Dürerstuben, Re-drum, Josh Winiberg, Trigoney, Dogboy aka Alan Doe, and Afromatik. Anyone wanting to discover these tracks can look at the interactive map on the collective’s website which shows their locations and gives a description of how you can locate it.
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Then you just take a walk through the forest, find the track, download it, and enjoy. Placing digital media content in unusual places is reminiscent of Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops project, which placed USB drives in random locations in various cities.
If Out of the Woods sounds rather complicated just to download something that can be done instantly from your smartphone, that’s kind of the point. As Really remark:
We regret that in this age of the internet, the hunt for music – that special feeling of going to the store, looking for that special record, and going back home with just one thing in mind, playing it – is being forgotten.
Each log has been geo-tagged on a public google route map for people to explore the forest and freely download the compilation.
Naturally Digital is a series of music experiments which captures the meeting between digital and natural.The aim of this series is to challenge human behavior and to alter music composition and perception by bending the thin line which ideally separates these two realms.
Last week we had location-based music at SXSW, now we have location-based music distribution.
[via the Gallery]
