In explaining how they built “what may be the most ambitious audiobook yet” for Nick Cave’s new novel, “The Death of Bunny Munro,” two artists explored the wide-open crossroads of audiobooks, digital books, and web video.
Artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have created materials for rock & roll artist and novelist Cave in the past, and they were granted access to a huge collection of sounds, clips and music from Cave’s musical vault. They created the iPhone app demonstrated in the video above, an audiobook mixing video, music, and Cave reading his novel. The essay also contains photos of Cave’s manuscript, extensively annotated for this unique audiobook application.
Here’s more from the essay: “The text is incredibly vivid and without doubt we’d begun to construct a mental image of Bunny’s world from our first reading, so we began by sharing those images with each other, and developing a kind of shared non-existent movie … But clocking in at over eight hours the soundtrack analogy only really goes so far. The finished result is really something else altogether. Something between a film soundtrack, a radio play and an hallucination.”