Sounds from the Meat Machine
Licensed Fool Productions - Houston, TX
V.5 - Son of Warehouse 
Sounds from the Meat Machine is a dissection of music composition through an increasingly necessary lens of dystopic modernity. Might a song echo the humanity of its creator? Or are we drawn to it – sometimes – because it's just a bop.
Brad Torres (composer Cast Away: A Musical Parody) leverages his decades as a music educator and improv comedian to take audience prompts, concluding the performance with the showcase of a brand-new piece – created in real time – of what some might call art.

Cast:
Brad Torres

Director:
Brad Torres

Show Info:
60 Mins minutes
Genre:
Musical

Audience:
Mature

Coarse Language

Thu July 16 2:30 PM
Fri July 17 12:45 PM
Sat July 18 4:15 PM
Tue July 21 9:30 PM
Thu July 23 6:00 PM
Fri July 24 12:45 PM
Sat July 25 2:30 PM
Sun July 26 8:00 PM

Sounds from the Meat Machine

Licensed Fool Productions—Son of Warehouse

Brad Torres presents a celebration of “meat-machine”-made music; a universal and perhaps inherently human science in the face of waves of AI-slop flooding streaming platforms. Using his keyboard to demonstrate the building blocks of musical composition, he aims to build an original piece with the audience by the end of the show.

Some of the more academic discussion on music theory might drag a little for the uninitiated. The opening-day audience included several music students, who appeared to delight in the show’s denser theoretical references. For those without a background in music theory, however, some of the material may prove harder to follow.

Audience input was largely relegated to the end and was a little tricky for some components (naming a musical key on command is simple, calling out a melody, less so). Even so, creating real music with real people, including working through the rough patches, is a joy that cannot be procedurally generated.

Ashley Frantik