The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Tribute You Need to Hear Today
Today marks a half-century since Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. The city itself is marking the occasion with a host of programs and activities, from symposiums and film programs to an official ceremony on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was shot—and if you find yourself anywhere near Memphis, by all means, check the city’s site or use #MLK50 on Twitter to find out more.
If you’re anywhere else and have 17 minutes to spare, there’s another tribute I’d recommend: The Italian musician Alessandro Cortini has overdubbed the original 17-minute audio of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech with electronic effects and abstract sounds created by analog and digital synthesizers—and while that might seem like a bad idea at best and blasphemy at worst, hold your tongue until you’ve heard it.
Though Cortini is best known as an occasional keyboardist with Nine Inch Nails, that band’s sound has virtually nothing to do with his solo work, which is the closest referent to his King tribute. Cortini uses a variety of (mostly antiquated) synths, including various iterations of a legendary modular system built by Don Buchla—Buchla’s machines rivaled Robert Moog’s better known synthesizers in the 1960s—as paintbrushes on a blank audio canvas, creating surprisingly emotional soundscapes with walls of noise and drone with the sort of long melodic line associated with ambient music.
But put aside the how for a moment and just do. Cortini, thankfully, included instructions when he posted the link to his piece on SoundCloud, and they’re both simple and righteous: “Play loud. Speak loud. Act loud.”
