Creativity is often the art of reinvention — combining known ideas in novel ways, putting a new spin on something old, pushing the exiting to a new frontier. Add an element of creative collaboration, and it becomes pure genius. And that’s exactly what music wunderkind Beck does in his latest project, Record Club.

This summer, Beck took the legendary Velvet Underground & Nico album (yes, that one…) and decided to invite a few friends — from actor Giovanni Ribisi to recording engineer and producer Nigel Godrich — to record cover versions of the full album in a single day.

The tracks, accompanied by trippy, minimalist video remixes of the studio sessions, are then posted on the Record Club website in daily installments.

Our favorite is the cover of “Run, Run, Run,” where the wonderful Icelandic up-and-comer Throunn Magnusdottir gives Nico a run for the money in a brilliant duet with Beck himself.

Another gem is the dreamy cover of the iconic “Sunday Morning,” both whimsically mellow and reverberating with quiet exuberance. And for “Venus In Furs“, arguably the first “goth” song ever recorded, they mustered an appropriately kinky cover involving a sitar and a flute bought on the street in Japan, fondly referred to as “the dying goose.”

Explore Record Club and appreciate the potent cocktail of some of today’s most powerful culture-drivers — retro revival, creative collaboration and the evolution of music production and distribution beyond record labels.

via Very Short List