Tesla Orchestra "covers" Girl Talk, Lady Gaga & many more.

At its cold, Electronic heart, Tesla [Coil] Orchestra is essentially Ian Charnas (Conductor), Keith Lewis (Music Director), and a handful of other various behind-the-scenes contributors. In lamens terms, Tesla Orchestra is basically 2 giant, electro-fied, music-making coils/"instruments."
The tedious process of building up the robotic "covers" generally starts off with obtaining the MIDI song files from the original artist. Then, segments of the track are crafted and sequenced... Sometimes parts of the track have to be left out, as the Tesla coils can only produce one note at a time. Keith Lewis elaborates, "We pick out the main melody and usually the bass line or harmony line from the existing track... Plug them into a standard MIDI track, send that information to the coils, and then play the backing track along with it."


Tesla Orchestra's latest effort - "Open Spark Project," is a 40-minute Master-Mix of many unique artists' works. In addition to the inclusion of well-known artists like Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) and Bach, many small, Indie/DIY artists are featured throughout. Submissions can be sent entered for future inclusion via the designated "Open Spark Project" web-space.
The above excerpt ["This Is THE Remix"] is taken from a recent May 14th Livestream, broadcast online. A follow-up "Best Of" performance is scheduled to take place on June 11th @ Cleveland's own Institute of Art. To book the group for a future gig, contact Ian Charnas @ info@teslaorchestra.com.