the decemberists: here come the waves.

I just got hard. Anything involving the visual interpretation of music is pretty exciting. Not just a music video, per se. A lot of the time, music videos are just a literal translation or version of a video. Song bumps, it’s in a club, booties shake, the end. Song is slow, singer holds someone, they gaze at each other, the end. These aren’t interpretations, they’re more like regurgitations.

So, when a band like The Decemberists employs four young film-makers to create animations interpreting their tracks, I get jumpy. For “Here Come The Waves: The Hazards Of Love Visualized” animations were created by Guilherme Marcondes, Julia Pott, Peter Sluszka and Santa Maria. On Oct. 19th, The Decemberists are playing a live show at UCLA synched entirely with the hour-long animation on screen. Which, clearly, would be fucking incredible. If anyone has tickets and feels like flying me to L.A., I would be more than up for it. Kthnx.

advanced beauty is finally released.

It was exactly one year ago tomorrow that I first posted about Advanced Beauty. I’ve been literally obsessed with its evolution ever since. Boasting an incredible list with some of the best talent working in motion graphics today – we’re talking Mate Steinforth, Carl Burgess, Karsten Schmidt, Robert Seidel, Pandapanther, Peppermelon, Minivegas, and way more – it’s easily been one of my most anticipated projects of the year.

I was hooked (freakishly in love with, actually) Advanced Beauty from the second I saw its jaw-dropping teaser trailer:

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Finally, after all the waiting, the HD-DVD is now for sale around the world and I got my hands on one last week. This is one of the rare and wonderful moments where you can declare, unequivocably and without reserve, that the result was absolutely beyond worth the wait. I watched it three times in a row on my first sitting. The art it contains doesn’t look and feel like anything you’ve ever seen before. It’s immersing and alive and doesn’t bombard the senses as much as slowly, lucidly, brilliantly fill them. It’s legal mind drugs. Glorious.

Advanced Beauty, hands down, full out, is absolutely my favourite project – in any media or genre – for 2008. And one of the most visually arresting and amazing thing I have ever seen in my whole life.

It feels to me like Advanced Beauty is one of those rarest thing in this modern, economy-threatened, bottom line world: a lush, beautiful, sensory-engrossing work of experimental art… just because. Art for the sake of art. Not for commericals, or movie credits, or music videos. But a forum for masters of a flourishing computer-genre new wave of design to experiment and drive their own forefront. It’s stuff like this that will drive the idea of art forward in the digital age. Advanced beauty indeed.

There is no picking favourites with a list of creators like this, but here are some of my favourite snippets, just to entice you. Curator Matt Pyke and his team at Universal Everything were ingenious in the way they marketed and grew buzz: they were generous with HD film clips like these, there was an Advanced Beauty podcast available on iTunes, there was a Facebook group they actually posted shit to. It was truly modern marketing, to a very wired and tech-savvy target audience, for a decidedly modern work of art. And there’s nothing about it not to love.

Mate Steinforth

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Karsten Schmidt

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Carl Burgess

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Pandapanther

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