For Record Store Day Black Friday (November 27th), acclaimed stage and screen actor John Malkovich is releasing Like a Puppet Show, a collaboration with photographer Sandro Miller and composer Eric Alexandrakis.
Miller took images of Malkovich, like the one above, as inspiration for Alexandrakis’ compositions, who then had Malkovich recited Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” over top the music. From there, the piece was sent out to a range of artists, including The Dandy Warhols, Placebo, Dweezil Zappa, OMD, and Young the Giant, for remixing. Today, Rolling Stone has premiered what’s sure to be the craziest contribution on the entire release in Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon’s contribution, “Cryolife 7:14 A.M.”
“I said, ‘Chop it up, use it as you like, put chickens next to it on an iPhone,'” Alexandrakis said of the famous family’s version. “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.”
Of course, it went in as strange and unsettling a direction as you’d imagine from the Ono clan. Yoko’s familiar wails vibrate and pulse in the background while her son delivers a smokey blues riff that swings around with jazzy indiscrimination. With Alexandrakis’ theatrically brooding piano parts and a skittering drum, there’s a trippy, boiling instrumental base for Malkovich’s cultivated reading of Plato’s mind-blowing parable.
Get ready for your world view to shift, and hit play below.
