October 7, 2003 7 October Absolut Threetracks: Absolut Ventures Into The World of Music
In the past two decades, ABSOLUT has established itself as a creative brand, not only through its advertising but also through its close relationship with the worlds of art and fashion. Now, with the launch of ABSOLUT THREE TRACKS featuring the composers/ producers Taxi, Rollercone and Aril Brikha, a new art discipline is added to the mix. Visit threetracks.com.”For years, our consumers have seen interpretations of the brand by some of the world’s most prominent artists and designers. With this new project they will also be able to listen to the brand: this is the voice of ABSOLUT,” explains Michael Persson, Market Communications Director at The Absolut Company in Stockholm.
The brief for the composers was simple: present your interpretation of the iconic ABSOLUT bottle. The results are as diverse as the personal styles of the participating artists.
For the ABSOLUT THREE TRACKS project, the focus was on club music and the composers were selected as representatives of different styles within the genre.
Taxi, who characterize their music as “always raw, always soulful and - hopefully - interesting and engaging,” have used the ABSOLUT bottle for their piece:
“We used the bottle as the source of all the sounds and created a melody based on the sounds we made. Basically, we took dozens of samples from a full/empty/half-empty bottle. We then re-pitched, stretched, reversed and filtered it through a keyboard and a lot of technical processes and played it like a piano,” says Taxi’s Paul Cullen. In the lyrics for their track “The Absolute”, the group found the paradox “in silence you can hear everything” intriguing and created a text inspired by Plato’s theory on absolute reality.
Patrick Duvoisin, a.k.a. ROLLERCONE, says his music is based on many styles, from down tempo tracks to soulful vocal house, but his personal trademark of atmospheric ambience and layers, a blend of musicians, samples and electronics makes it his own.
“I wanted my ABSOLUT piece to be clubby as this is the place where I usually see ABSOLUT. I also wanted to show the arty side of the brand without losing the wit. I have created a track that pays tribute to all the artists who have worked with ABSOLUT, imagining them meeting at a party where all their names would have been on the guest list. And what better way to present this than with a nice French-speaking woman who arrives to see what names are on the list? What’s funny is that some people who heard it just think it’s a girl trying to blab her way into a club.”
Aril Brikha, who has established himself within the Detroit scene, says his music is simply “High-Tech Soul”. About his ABSOLUT piece he says:
“I chose to use the words clarity, simplicity, perfection to accentuate what I wanted to affect with the music. I first made the music and then added the words along with sounds from the shape of an ABSOLUT bottle. I had scanned the shape into a computer program that turns a picture into a tone - a futuristic way of including a picture without letting the listener know. I find it quite similar to previous ABSOLUT projects where the bottle has been hidden in a picture.”
“This project is a tribute to the DJ/producer. The role of the DJ has been transformed from that of simply playing records to becoming true visionaries. They are explorers of the world of music, changing the map of a traditional art form - attributes that fully comply with the way ABSOLUT looks at the world,” says Persson.
At absolut.com/threetracks, the audience is presented with one individual experience for each track. The three pieces of music differ significantly in terms of character, tempo and build-up, which entails that the website actually offers three different experiences. The website can be characterized as a blend of the strong visuals you find in a music video and the catchy interactivity of a truly great website.
