Visiting The Sonos Studio in the middle of the afternoon is a little bit like visiting a museum about some music of the past, sorry, I don’t doubt the place was packed and alive when Beck showed up for the grand opening last week and musicians performed his new songs, but it looked a little bit desolated on Thursday afternoon.
Located on La Brea avenue in Los Angeles, the immaculate place features a mini studio for musicians and fans to record their own versions of the songs from Song Reader, which Beck exclusively released as sheet music, and then upload them to the official site of the project SongReader.net. During the Q&A, Beck said he got the idea when someone gave him the sheet music for one of his sold songs, he found it interesting, so he released 20 original compositions like this
The Sonos studio has created a space ‘specially tailored to allow visitors to both engage with these audience interpretations and to create them’, it brings the project to life, they say,… still life for me I have to say! They certainly have an awesome equipment and a small stage to perform, not being a musician, I have observed this from an outsider eye, not imagining a minute stepping on this stage or touching anything, but I spent a few minutes in the place, observing the drawings and paintings made by a few artists to illustrate the new songs. Without being familiar with them, it was also kind of mysterious, but titles such as ‘I’m Down’, ‘Now that Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings’, ‘Rough on Rats’, ‘Why did you make me care?’ or ‘Mutilation Rag’ or lyrics such as ‘Don't let anybody find out/ What a lamb could never tell’ sounded Beck enough. There also were a few examples of Beck’s favorite sheet music, from his own collection, in display something that seems to matter a lot to him… At the end, is it some kind of nostalgia? Some kind of snobbism? After all, he didn’t even interpret any of them the day of the opening of the exhibit, letting other musicians taking the stage and imagining his own work. You would think this has to be a little frustrating for an artist, right? Not for Beck, he said he fell in love with the many renditions his work has inspired, which were posted on YouTube and on the SongReader website. And some of them are really good!
As a non-musician, I am the one feeling frustrated, but if you are a musician, Beck may have given you the best gift ever, an interactive piece of art that can be totally yours.
