GE doesn't just do whatever it is that GE does. It makes beats, too.
Last year, GE brought you an electronica song featuring the sounds of shipping containers, as interpreted by Reuben Wu of Ladytron. Now the engineering brand is back with a sequel that graduates to samples from a broader range of GE's heavy machinery—thousands, we're told, including a jet engine—as assembled by artist Matthew Dear.
Created with The Barbarian Group, the campaign essentially argues a natural alignment between GE and music, focusing on the brand's use of acoustics to test that its equipment is functioning properly. Andrew Gorton, an acoustics engineer for GE, worked with Dear to record sounds at a GE research facility in Niskayuna, N.Y., a process documented in a video produced by m ss ng p eces. A package of the loops Dear created is available to download via BitTorrent so that anyone can remix them.
While the symbiosis might seem like a stretch, it's hard to fault GE for not wanting to bore regular people with too much geek talk about turbines and who cares what else. The resulting track, titled "Drop Science," is certainly worth a listen.
That is, if you like the electronic music genre in general, it's fun. If you don't, you might think it sounds like a bunch of beeping machines.
