In case you haven’t figured it out over the last 30 some-odd years of him being a relatively well-known actor, John Malkovich is kind of a weird dude. His latest strange project is a collaboration with Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon called “Cryolife 7:14 a.m.”
The whole track is Malkovich reading Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” over a pretty nice groove while Yoko does Yoko things. The track comes from Malkovich’s spoken word album Like a Puppet Show (a reference to the allegory), which consists entirely of Malkovich reading Plato. The baseline of all the tracks on Show was created by Malkovich and composer Eric Alexandrakis. The tracks were recorded by Malkovich and Alexandrakis, and sent to other artists to remix.
Malkovich and Alexandrakis explained the production of “Cryolife” in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“[Yoko] is obviously very bright and super interesting and very enigmatic,” Malkovich said. “She’s had a very interesting journey and led an incredibly interesting life. She’s lived — and lived through — a lot of cultural changes and the great thing is, she’s still doing stuff.”
“I said, ‘Chop it up, use it as you like, put chickens next to it on an iPhone,'” Alexandrakis added. “It can be as avant-garde or as lo-fi as people wanted, so I didn’t really want to tell them too much direction.”
In addition to Sean Lennon and Yoko’s contribution, Show contains remixes from Ric Ocasek (of The Cars and producing Weezer’s best album fame), Dweezil Zappa and others.
