Video artist James Houston used hard drives and dot matrix printers to play a song by Radiohead. Houston, of Glasgow, Scotland, found that old personal computers could provide a wonderful range of bleeps. He added the sliding whirs of image scanners to the mix of clicks and tones. The less musical the old technology sounded, the more sympathetic the effect — as though the machines were straining for a beauty beyond their humble states.
Houston says the sounds were there for the harvesting. He just had to keep tinkering with the machinery. "It was a matter of prodding and poking to try to get good music out of it," he says.
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Remaking Radiohead, With Dot Matrix Printers : NPR Music
