Your days of sitting alone in your dorm room weeping quietly to The Moon & Antarctica may be over, but that doesn't mean Modest Mouse doesn't have anything to offer. The rock band, founded in Issaquah, Washington, in 1993, has released a weird new web app to promote the release of its middling comeback album, Strangers to Ourselves.
Modest Mouse calls its app the "Strangers Linguistic Remix Generator." Upon loading up the website, the generator asks you to input a phrase of up to 96 characters, then dynamically converts it into a remix based on samples from Modest Mouse's new record, complete with a seemingly random music video broken up into kaleidoscopic patterns.
"The algorithm compares common letter frequency data, and generates stems and patterns to match," explain Modest Mouse (or, more likely, the band's for-hire developers at The Uprising Creative), for the more technically minded. "It also analyzes the sentiment of the text to determine the final BPM of the remix. Depending on the input, a remix can consist of up to three phrases; or, more commonly put, a verse, a chorus, and a bridge. Each remix then generates a visualizer inspired by the album artwork."
It's a fun app to play around with, even if the results sound more like the Residents on bath salts than Modest Mouse. The full experience reminds me of the video loop that is playing behind the Rastafarian DJ during the Derelicte show in 2001's Zoolander. You may take from that description what you will.
Check out the Strangers Linguistic Remix Generator here. Suggestion: "Butthead" is a pretty good place to start.