During the fall of 2016, for the Broken Orchestra recording sessions, we invited talented musicians from around Philadelphia to improvise on rusted horns, splintered double basses, padless saxophones and busted-up snares to craft a sample library of hundreds of ‘wounded’ but magnificently unique instruments. These broken instrument sounds became the raw material for Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang new orchestral work Symphony For Broken Instruments. 

As the team at Found Sound Nation went down the rabbit hole of bizarre and wonderful sounds created by a vast array of bruised and battered instruments we realized that we were in the process of archiving a truly unique sound bank - a trove of singular instruments, never-to-be-heard or played again. We invited artists worldwide to creatively reimagine these Broken Orchestra samples, generating new works in any style and by any means they wished; the single criteria was to only use the sample pack as the raw material for creation and to “embrace the [instruments’] brokenness.” 

With over 120 submissions from around the world, featuring innovative production by artists from Kazakhstan to Indonesia, we decided to curate not only the ‘winners’ of the competition but some of our favorite picks, alongside a selection of commissioned tracks by acclaimed producers and musicians including Daedelus, Julia Holter, Ian Chang (Son Lux), Miho Hatori, Half Waif and Angelica Negron.

A very special thanks to Robert Blackson, Temple Contemporary, David Lang, Red Poppy Music, Devin Greenwood, Arun Pandian, The Found Sound Nation family and all the musicians who submitted to our Broken Orchestra Remixed Competition.