Sunset in Austin. (Photo by Jack Newton)It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who downloaded either of Bluebrain’s two location-aware albums last year that transformed the National Mall and Central Park into dreamlike soundscapes that the experimental pop duo of brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay are now being commissioned to create orchestral, portable soundtracks for other places.
After hearing about The National Mall and Central Park: Listen to the Light, Bluebrain’s iPhone apps that use a listener’s location in the respective parks to play a corresponding track, the organizers of South by Southwest Interactive asked the Holladays to come up with something for the city of Austin, Tex. Not the whole city, of course, but a decent chunk of the downtown area near where the tech festival and conference will be held.
The Violet Crown, which will be available on Apple’s App Store next month, gets its name from a nickname for the Texas capital believed to be coined in 1894 by O. Henry in his short story “Tictoq: The Great French Detective”:
The drawing-rooms of one of the most magnificent private residences in Austin are ablaze of lights. Carriages line the streets in front, and from gate to doorway is spread a velvet carpet, on which the delicate feet of the guests may tread. The occasion is the entrée into society of one of the fairest buds in the City of the Violet Crown.
That blanket of light also extends to a pinkish glow often seen on the horizon at twilight in Austin, Ryan Holladay points out in an email.
The Violet Crown covers a swath of Austin about six blocks north and six blocks west of the convention center, where Bluebrain is also playing a show during SXSW Interactive. But whereas the National Mall and Central Park apps were made for people weaving around grassy patches and walking trails, city streets are a bit more limiting.
“Since it’s mapped for the streets, there are only so many directions people can walk,” Holladay said.
And the music, a tapestry of soaring atmospherics and “some pretty wild electronics,” was composed with only a digital frame of reference. Unlike the more readily accessible Mall and Central Park, the Holladays did not physically scout Austin. Instead, they relied on Google Earth with Streetview for inspiration, the upshot being that The Violet Crown will not have had a testing period the way its predecessors did.
“When we are down there, that will be our first experience with walking the album ourselves,” Ryan Holladay said.
The Violet Crown (Austin, Texas) – A New Location-Aware Composition for SXSW Interactive from BLUEBRAIN on Vimeo.
