Things have been a bit dark and dreary in the eCool Compound for the past few months.  Never mind that it’s been raining in Rome for most of the winter, so the climactic conditions haven’t much  helped our moods.  But, among the things cheering us up in the past few days is a video by the band Hold Your Horses for their song “70 Million.”

If you don’t already know them, Hold Your Horses is a Franco-American band and they’re cheeky!  As you’ll see in the still we’re including in this post, the “70 Million” video offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation that’s all their own.

Here, we’re showing you some of the Italian paintings they create, including Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, and Caravaggio’s Salome with the Head of John the Baptist. There’s some other fine stuff too that you can see if you click over and watch the whole video on Vimeo — from Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa to David’s Death of Marat and from Munch’s The Scream to Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, it’s rocking version of art history that’s definitely going to be hitting our classrooms in the next weeks!

The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio plays tonight at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera. And then they’ll spend the next month traveling, so if you’re not in Rome catch them in Barcelona, New York, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, or Los Angeles in the coming month. Here’s why you should see them:

The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio consists of 16 musicians from 11 countries, 4 continents and 8 different languages who come together to create a novel kind of music.

It’s hard to tell which aim was most ambitious: creating an orchestra of thirty foreign musicians with unrelated instruments from different personal, popular-music backgrounds, or saving Rome’s early-twentieth-century Apollo Cinema from becoming a bingo hall and, instead, transforming it into a multi-media, multi-ethnic theater. In the case of the Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio, it is safe to say that, at its purest and most devout, art begets art.

Filmmaker Agostino Ferrente and Avion Travel musician Mario Tronco, both native residents of the Piazza Vittorio neighborhood in Rome, endeavored to do both with the formation of The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio. Drawing from the artistic population of this old area, they fused cultures and traditions, old and new sounds, unknown instruments and more than sixty ethnic groups (more foreign residents than Italians) to bring distant-yet-universal melodies to the public ear.

The resulting sound is hard to categorize—especially considering the various instruments and diverse artistic and geographic backgrounds of the musicians. It’s more than World Music; it’s Neighborhood Music: folk, classical, pop, jazz and the undeniable tones of the street. The fact that each musician feels represented by this album truly gives the sense of the entire project.

The Orchestra di Piazza Vittorio is already a sociological phenomenon welcomed enthusiastically by national and international media, studied by university professors, researchers and international conferences and celebrated by fans across the globe. Beyond its clear political and social value, the orchestra has become a mini-miracle of neighborhood and cultural initiative by bringing to the stage the traditions (musical and otherwise) from Tunisia, India, Africa, Cuba and beyond.

The story itself is a wildly popular film in Italy which depicts the epic five-year history of the orchestra, infused with ironic humor and astonishing persistence, as they struggle against ever-new obstacles, but ultimately succeed in creating this astounding musical group.