Wuki is the solo project of Denver-based producer Kris Barman. His take on Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee was created for the VR rhythm game Beat Saber.
And if you think that was fast…
In 2010 Violinist Ben Lee set the World’s Fastest Musician record for playing Flight of the Bumblee in 64.21 seconds. Flight of the Bumblebee used to be the test piece for the Guiness World Records fastest musician, but the category has since been suspended as musicians began playing the piece so fast that even slowed down it became impossible to assess their accuracy.
The record for the world’s fastest rap is currently held by Eminem for a 40 second segment of his single Godzilla where he averages 7.5 words per second.
The record for the world’s fastest drumming is held by an 11-year-old Australian, Pritish A R, averaging an incredible 39.5 beats per second.
For another very different Flight of the Bumblee cover version click here!
A collaboration between VSQ (The Vitamin String Quartet) and L.A Contemporary Dance Company from 2021. VSQ is a series of string quartet projects developed and produced by CMH Label Group, an independent record company based in Los Angeles.
Blinding Lights by The Weeknd (Canadian singer and songwriter Abel Makkonen Tesfaye) was released in 2019 and was the bestselling global single in 2020, the most streamed song in Spotify’s history and the first song to spend an entire year in the Billboard Top 10,
How can you go wrong with Australia’s Queen of Yodelling? Mary’s album Yodelling the Classics was released in 1997, 16 years after her debult album The Magic of Yodelling (which reached number 33 in the Austalian charts!) and it’s 1983 follow up Can’t Stop Yodelling. Which indeed she can’t, Mary is 90 years old now and still going strong.
The Sound of Criss Cross was an alias for French jazz musician, composer and conductor Jean Bouchéty, aka Johnny Glider. This track was taken from his one and only Sound of Criss Cross album, first released in 1973 and then re-issued under verious different names throughout the seventies.
Over a decade earlier Bouchéty had arranged a cover of La Bamba for Les Chaussettes Noires (The Black Socks), one of France’s first rock and roll bands. Les Chaussettes Noires singer, Eddy Mitchell, went solo in 1963 and whilst playing in London was often accompanied by Big Jim Sullivan and Jimmy Page on guitar, and in 2005 he was the voice of Flappy (Dylan) in the French version of The Magic Roundabout.
The Barber of Seville was a comic opera composed by Gioachino Rossini, first performed in 1816 and based on a play of the same name written by Pierre Beaumarchais in 1775. The first recording of the opera was not for over a hundred years since its first stage performance and appeared in 1919.
Brazilian pianist, composer, arranger and producer Eumir Deodato de Almeida won a Grammy in 1974 for this interpretation of Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. Composed by Strauss in 1896, the original piece was inspired by Nietzsche’s philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The initial fanfare – Sunrise – has since become synonymous with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The Boomtown Rats’ I Don’t Like Mondays was inspired by the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting in San Diego, California which took the lives of two adults and injured eight children and a police officer. The shooter, 16-year-old Brenda Ann Spencer said, when asked by a reporter the reasons for her actions while she was still barricaded in her house, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day”. For Christmas a few weeks earlier she had asked her father, an alcoholic who she was forced to share a bed with, for a radio but instead he had bought her a .22 calibre rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition.
Bob Geldof said about writing the song with Rats co-founder and keyboardist Johnnie Fingers:
“I was doing a radio interview in Atlanta with Johnnie Fingers and there was a telex machine beside me. I read it as it came out. Not liking Mondays as a reason for doing somebody in is a bit strange. I was thinking about it on the way back to the hotel and I just said ‘silicon chip inside her head had switched to overload’. I wrote that down. And the journalists interviewing her said, ‘Tell me why?’ It was such a senseless act. It was the perfect senseless act and this was the perfect senseless reason for doing it. So perhaps I wrote the perfect senseless song to illustrate it. It wasn’t an attempt to exploit tragedy.”
Geldof later admtted that he regretted writing the song because he had made Brenda Spencer famous, saying “[Spencer] wrote to me saying ‘she was glad she’d done it because I’d made her famous,’ which is not a good thing to live with.“
I Don’t Like Mondays was released as a single seven months after the shooting. Brenda Spencer was charged as an adult for the crime and a day after her 18th birthday in 1980 she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She is still currently incarcerated, 40 years later, having been denied parole several times.
The London Symphony Orchestra’s re-imagining of I Don’t Like Mondays runs at more than twice the length of the original and was recorded for their Classic Rock – Rock Classics album, released by K-tel in 1981.
The London Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1904 and is the oldest of London’s symphony orchestras, also claiming to be the world’s most recorded orchestra; it has made gramophone recordings since 1912 and has played on more than 200 movie soundtracks, including Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The Royal Choral Society is a London based amateur choir, originally formed in 1871 and still active today.
Founded in 1962, Canadian company K-tel began life selling household consumer products through informercials and live demonstrations. Their first product was a Teflon-coated frying pan. Diversifying into LPs, often prominently advertised on television, their sales increased from $23 million in 1971 to $178 million in 1981.
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