American Psycho: The Musical

Erm..

April 25, 2013

Bret Easton Ellis has taken time out from acting like a berk on Twitter to help pen a musical based on his infamous novel American Psycho, alongside Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Duncan Sheik and director Rupert Goold.

The venture is being funded via Kickstarter, where your donation can also snag you signed copies of the book and special business-card shaped USB sticks, pre-loaded with music from the show. You imagine it might struggle to compete with Mary Harron’s fantastic film adaptation but it’ll probably be worth seeing just to find out if it can out-grotesque the Book of Mormon’s songs about female genital mutilation. However, seeing as Easton questions himself in the promotional video above, asking “why am I trusting these people with my work?”, maybe we shouldn’t hold out too much hope. Still, those business cards look pretty sweet…

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Where do you go after having made an album that follows the journey of a single pig from birth to plate, created using recordings made along the way? Well if you're Matthew Herbert, musical inspiration is never very far away. His new album consists of a single ten second recording of a bomb going off, recorded and emailed to him by a journalist in Libya during the 2011 uprising. He's explored this recording to within an inch of its life, using it as the basis for an entire album. "I want to freeze history, press pause, wander around inside the sound," explains Herbert, explaining that he's "trying to understand its component parts, wondering why it was so scary when I had never actually heard any bomb firsthand". It's scary because it's a bloody bomb, Matthew. To be fair, the stream he's released so far, below, is pretty scary too...