This portal is dedicated to Symphony for a Broken Orchestra and its mission to fix and repair hundreds of broken instruments and return them to public schools. Featuring the Broken O Typewriter - a living composition made up of hundreds of musical ideas played by broken instruments through your computer keyboard.
Kate Shilonova’s latest album was created using Found Sound Nation’s Broken Orchestra sample pack (a catalogue of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools). Check it out, some very interesting sounds there. You can also listen to what people like Daedelus have done w/ them. The Broken Orchestra typewriter is fun too.
You have to send an e-mail first to get the links to the sounds but here they are anyway:
Short Film Spotlight: Broken Orchestra (dir. Charlie Tyrell)
The Symphony for a Broken Orchestra project collected hundreds of broken instruments from the Philadelphia public school system, fixed them, and then returned them to the hands of students.
Film stills and poster courtesy of Broken Orchestra.
Miss Barton's Famous Cakes: Film Noir Short | People Zoo
this was very heavy handed in it's approach, the rat poison was visible within the first 10s of the film, the guys were behaving incredibly suspicious—the camera lingered a little too long on the article clippings which read like a 8yo wrote it, it would be one thing if it was well written but that was painful how little effort they put into the details. And the final nail on the coffin was giving her a picture of themselves but the set design & quality of the film & actress was great, it just needed more nuance, better dialogue with the rest of it—I mean with only 12 minutes what could you do but sharpen everything to just slight hints here & there—instead what they ended up doing was try to pass their driving test with repeated and exaggerated signals, definitionally not low-key..
Film noir (/nwɑːr/; French: [film nwaʁ]) is a style of Hollywood crime drama that emphasizes cynical attitudes and motivations. The 1940s and 1950s are generally regarded as the "classic period" of American film noir. Film noir of this era is associated with a low-key, black-and-white visual style that has roots in German expressionist cinematography. Many of the prototypical stories and attitudes expressed in classic noir derive from the hardboiled school of crime fiction that emerged in the United States during the Great Depression, known as noir fiction.
Example: The Stranger (1946) by Orson Welles.
The question of what defines film noir and what sort of category it is, provokes continuing debate. "We'd be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel ..."—this set of attributes constitutes the first of many attempts to define film noir made by French critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton in their 1955 book Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953 (A Panorama of American Film Noir), the original and seminal extended treatment of the subject. They emphasize that not every noir film embodies all five attributes in equal measure—one might be more dreamlike; another, particularly brutal. The authors' caveats and repeated efforts at alternative definition have been echoed in subsequent scholarship, but in the words of cinema historian Mark Bould, film noir remains an "elusive phenomenon.
Though film noir is often identified with a visual style that emphasizes low-key lighting and unbalanced compositions, films commonly identified as noir evidence a variety of visual approaches, including ones that fit comfortably within the Hollywood mainstream. Film noir similarly embraces a variety of genres, from the gangster film to the police procedural to the gothic romance to the social problem picture—any example of which from the 1940s and 1950s, now seen as noir's classical era, was likely to be described as a melodrama at the time.
Others argue film noir is not a genre. It is often associated with an urban setting, but many classic noirs take place in small towns, suburbia, rural areas, or on the open road; setting is not a determinant, as with the Western. Similarly, while the private eye & femme fatale are stock character types conventionally identified with noir, the majority of films in the genre feature neither. Nor does film noir rely on anything as evident as monstrous or supernatural elements of horror film, the speculative leaps of science fiction film, or the song-and-dance routines of the musical.
It is night, always. The hero enters a labyrinth on a quest. He is alone & off balance. He may be desperate, in flight, or coldly calculating, imagining he is the pursuer rather than the pursued. A woman invariably joins him at a critical juncture, when he is most vulnerable. [Her] eventual betrayal of him (or herself) is as ambiguous as her feelings about him. Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night (1997)
An analogous case is of the screwball comedy, widely accepted by film historians as constituting a "genre," screwball is defined not by a fundamental attribute, but by a general disposition and a group of elements, some—but rarely & perhaps never all—of which are found in each of the genre's films. Because of the diversity of noir (much greater than of the screwball comedy), certain scholars in the field, such as film historian Thomas Schatz, treat it as not a genre but a "style." Alain Silver, the most widely published American critic specializing in film noir studies, refers to film noir as a "cycle" & a "phenomenon", even as he argues it has—like certain genres—a consistent set of visual and thematic codes. Screenwriter Eric R. Williams labels both film noir and screwball comedy a "pathway" in his screenwriters taxonomy; explaining a pathway has two parts: 1) the way the audience connects with the protagonist and 2) the trajectory the audience expects the story to follow. Other critics treat film noir as a "mood," a "series", or simply a chosen set of films they regard as belonging to the noir "canon." There is no consensus on the matter.
Background Cinematic Sources
The aesthetics of film noir were influenced by German Expressionism, an artistic movement of the 1910s and 1920s that involved theater, music, photography, painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as cinema. The opportunities offered by the booming Hollywood film industry and then the threat of Nazism led to the emigration of many film artists working in Germany who had been involved in the Expressionist movement or studied with its practitioners.
M (1931), shot only a few years before director Fritz Lang's departure from Germany, is among the first crime films of the sound era to join a characteristically noirish visual style with a noir-type plot, in which the protagonist is a criminal (as are his most successful pursuers). Directors Lang, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Siodmak & Michael Curtiz brought a dramatically shadowed lighting style & a psychologically expressive approach to visual composition (mise-en-scène) with them to Hollywood, where they made some of the most famous classic noirs.
Mise-en-scène ("placing on stage" or "what is put into the scene") is stage design & arrangement of actors in scenes for a theatre or film production, both in visual arts thru storyboarding, visual themes, and cinematography & in narrative-storytelling through directions. MES is commonly used to refer to single scenes that are representative of a film. MES has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term". Ed Sikov has attempted to define it as "the totality of expressive content within the image". It has been criticized for its focus on the dramatic design aspects rather than the plot itself, as those who utilize MES tend to look at what is "put before the camera" rather than the story. The use of MES is significant as it allows the director to convey messages to the viewer through what is placed in the scene, not just the scripted lines spoken and acted in the scene. MES allows the director to not only convey their message but also implement their aesthetic; as such, each director has their own unique MES. MES refers to everything in front of the camera, including the set design, lighting, and actors, and the ultimate way this influences how the scene comes together for the audience.
By 1931, Curtiz had already been in Hollywood for half a decade, making as many as six films a year. Movies of his such as 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932) and Private Detective 62 (1933) are among the early Hollywood sound films arguably classifiable as noir—scholar Marc Vernet offers the latter as evidence that dating the initiation of film noir to 1940 or any other year is "arbitrary". Expressionism-orientated filmmakers had free stylistic rein in Universal horror pictures such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932)—the former photographed and the latter directed by the Berlin-trained Karl Freund—and The Black Cat (1934), directed by Austrian émigré Edgar G. Ulmer. The Universal horror film that comes closest to noir, in story and sensibility, is The Invisible Man (1933), directed by Englishman James Whale and photographed by American Arthur Edeson. Edeson later photographed The Maltese Falcon (1941), widely regarded as the first major film noir of the classic era.
Josef von Sternberg was directing in Hollywood during the same period. Films of his such as Shanghai Express (1932) and The Devil Is a Woman (1935), with their hothouse eroticism and baroque visual style anticipated central elements of classic noir. The commercial and critical success of Sternberg's silent Underworld (1927) was largely responsible for spurring a trend of Hollywood gangster films. Successful films in that genre such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) demonstrated there was an audience for crime dramas with morally reprehensible protagonists. An important, possibly influential, cinematic antecedent to classic noir was 1930s French poetic realism, with its romantic, fatalistic attitude & celebration of doomed heroes. The movement's sensibility is mirrored in the Warner Bros. drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), a forerunner of noir. Among films not considered noir, perhaps none had a greater effect on the development of the genre than Citizen Kane (1941), directed by Orson Welles. Its visual intricacy & complex, voiceover narrative structure are echoed in dozens of classic film noirs.
Italian neorealism of the 1940s, with its emphasis on quasi-documentary authenticity, was an acknowledged influence on trends that emerged in American noir. The Lost Weekend (1945), directed by Billy Wilder, another Vienna-born, Berlin-trained American auteur, tells the story of an alcoholic in a manner evocative of neorealism.[36] It also exemplifies the problem of classification: one of the first American films to be described as a film noir, it has largely disappeared from considerations of the field.[37] Director Jules Dassin of The Naked City (1948) pointed to the neorealists as inspiring his use of location photography with non-professional extras. This semidocumentary approach characterized a substantial number of noirs in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Along with neorealism, the style had an American precedent cited by Dassin, in director Henry Hathaway's The House on 92nd Street (1945), which demonstrated the parallel influence of the cinematic newsreel.
Philadephia Film Festival 2019: Best Short was Broken Orchestra 12min
A documentary short about the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra where over 1500 left-for-dead instruments were repaired and returned to Philadelphia public schools.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, is notable for its rich history, on display at the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall (where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution were signed) and other American Revolutionary sites. Also iconic are the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, immortalized by Sylvester Stallone’s triumphant run in the film "Rocky." ― Google (0.1% of the population cared)
ZIP Codes: 19092–19093, 19099, 191xx
Population: 1.574 million (2024)
Area codes: 215, 267, 445
Demonym: Philadelphian
Elevation: 39 ft (12 m)
Founded: 1682; 343 years ago
Incorporated: October 25, 1701
Pat D is a Hull based producer whose three LPs have stuck a resonant cord on my appreciation of jazzy hip hop from the moment I first heard his debut, 2007’s Kind Of Peace. Although his style is reminiscent of his mainstay influences – Tribe, Sound Providers, and The Roots amongst others – his beats are unmistakeably idiosyncratic, tending to veer towards the more cool-out end of the hip hop spectrum.
Pat D & Lady Paradox - Perspectives
Pat D & Lady Paradox - Leave It Behind
The one salient emotion I habitually get from listening to Pat D is one of uplifting melancholia, throwback escapism. Perhaps it’s the recurring snippets of speech of old jazz musicians (amongst others, saxophonist Johnny Griffin and vocalist Jon Hendricks) that conclude a few of the tracks on his debut, or the fact that his output has a nostalgic, introspective quality that not only mirrors his love for old jazz licks, but also perfectly compliments the rhymes of the main MC of all 3 projects, Lady Paradox. She is a gifted rapper, and her very personal and honest approach on the mic is one facet to what makes the duo’s ongoing collaboration such a successful one.
Pat was gracious enough to answer a few CHOICE questions.
CC - How did your career as a producer start?
Pat D - I began as a DJ, collecting records, mixing, scratching etc.... I was never great at it but it was definitely the gateway to production, even if it was just the introduction to vinyl and sound manipulation. My very very first beats began on a really basic computer set up, using reason, then moved to reason and logic then moved into just logic, mpc and more sample based stuff. Currently I work from a really nice recording studio called Element Studio in Hull where I can record just about anything, the equipment is top notch and the room acoustics are great. I tend to do a combination of recording at the studio and mix from home. My methods have always remained the same, most of my stuff is recorded into logic and arranged and sequenced and mixed from there. Everything is pretty much recorded as audio then used arranged in Logic. My set up has improved throughout the years but I still maintain the creative methods.
What you think of the hip hop industry today, specifically the UK scene?
To be honest, I haven't been buying much Hip-Hop at all recently, my interests have changed a little, I still love Hip-Hop but I don't feel that I have heard anything amazing for a while. One Hip-Hop album I did buy recently though was buy Has-Lo, really great album. With regard to UK Hip-Hop, I couldn't really comment on anything in the last 2-3 years except to say that there is probably some really great stuff being made but I feel like I've been out of the loop for a while. The last UK Hip-Hop release I got was Prose (Steady and Efeks) which was a great album, really nice!
How would you describe your working relationship with Lady Paradox?
We spoke on myspace around 2004/05 and got chatting about working together. It moved pretty quickly from there into making our first album, which we did in 2006 ish... I think we've worked together so many times because our styles fit pretty well. Many people have mixed feelings on Lady P but I've always said she's great. I love the honesty in her writing, she totally puts her soul on the verse. I also love the surprise element to her persona, she's a young woman who looks nothing like a stereotypical emcee so when she does spit its a massive shock to hear. I love that in music in this day and age. She's also a really nice person with a lot to say. I still feel she's under rated in the Hip-Hop world.
The quality of pop music seems to be on an interminable downward slope - what do you see as the future of hip hop?
Interesting question. I really have no idea. The genre has taken so many twists and turns in the last ten years. I feel that certain aspects of Hip-Hop music don't hold much weight any more but there are still loads of people making some really great music from the Soul. Check out The Fakehunters and a beatmaker called Ill treats. They are what Hip-Hop should sound like!
Do you have any new projects in the pipeline?
I am currently working on a new project with a friend of mine called The Broken Orchestra [check it out here]. We had one single out last December and are currently finishing off an album. We work with musicians, artists, singers and emcees to create a slightly different sound to my previous stuff. We're currently several tracks in and I'm loving it. Check out our last track with vocalist Anna Stott, entitled Closer.
And last, but definitely not least, Tupac or Biggie?
The Broken Orchestra - Closer (feat. Anna Stott) - Awesome video & laid back deep jazz vibes with sultry vocals. If you dig Nostalgia 77's latest effort (especially "Simmerdown") then this is right up your alley. also check out the two tracks on the Broken Orchestra Soundcloud. (via @soul_identity via @giantstep)
What Giant Step wrote:
Jazzy and addictively melodic, UK-based band The Broken Orchestra releases their second single, “Closer,” with this playful animated video. Ana Stott lays down some amazing buttery vocals, taking you back to your favorite downtempo groove. Look out for opportunities to purchase this track around August.
We are very excited to hear what’s next from this band. Below are a couple other sweet tracks that will have you swooning over The Broken Orchestra in no time.
