jump jump dance dance + claire carré: show me the night.
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why? + agustin carbonere: these hands.
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kid sam + sherwin akbarzadeh: we’re mostly made of water.
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Under Byen + Sidste Carsens: Alt Er Tabt.
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There’s something unsettlingly intimate yet oddly fascinating about watching strangers eat. Not every bodily function becomes social, and as far as bodily functions go the range of experiences possible within the act of eating are pretty unlimited. There aren’t too many different ways to breathe and blink and heartbeat and cell divide; eating, however, is almost infinite.
Infinite in its goodness, but also in its grotesqueness. In his video for Swedish electro-duo Dmitry Fyodorov’s “Simcoe”, the first track off their upcoming album “Shapeless”, SektorFilm director Markus Waltå whips up a rhythmic orgy of mundane food moments. The blankness, the shovelling, the swallowing without chewing. All of this, contemplating in close-up what each of these subjects are thinking (or trying not to think of) as they eat, builds slowly into the one thing that’s more satisfying to do with food than to eat it: to fight with it.
Via Antville
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Canadian Alan Poon directed one of my favourite music videos of all time, 2008’s incredible macro-masterpiece for Bowerbirds’ “In Our Talons.” That track was a fiery lament against man’s destruction of the natural world, and Poon created a perfect visual to accompany it: a twisted, contorted microscopic look at our affect on the Earth and everything else that isn’t us.
In his latest, for Zeus’ “Marching Through Your Head”, he continues to examine stop-motion and hyper-realistic nature imagery to create a dreamy, sharp, saturated landscape. This time, with a more light-hearted track, he gets to be humorous and play with marching shoes that grow bushes which turn into Zeus who jam, appropriately, in a ruin on the top of a mountain.
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Via Motionographer
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I first discovered Danish experimental pop collective Efterklang when some of their music was featured in Jeremiah Zagar’s brilliant family autobiographical film “In A Dream.” Both the film and the music were some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
Efterklang’s sound is ethereal and dreamy and huge. Luckily, it leaves itself so open to visual interpretation. Not a blank canvas, but a launching pad, ready to propel the song into whatever video the lucky director gets to imagine.
For “Modern Drift”, that director is Danish multi-media artist Kristian Leth. The song is gorgeous, and for it Leth has sewn together a stunning and simple vision of nature and life that is achingly lovely.
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Caribou is easily one of the best things that’s happened to music in the last ten years. I remember where I was sitting the first time I heard “Melody Day” and tripped over myself to find out who was making that colossal, layered, glorious mash-up of sound. I didn’t think it could, but it gets better, courtesy of Caribou drummer Brad Weber…
Pick A Piper is a collective from Weber along with Angus Fraser, Dan Roberts, and Clint Scrivener. They leave no sonic stone unturned: flute, trumpets, glockenspiel, flutes, hand claps, bells, and basically anything you can hit to make a sound. But more than anything it’s the percussion assault that gets you. Their music doesn’t just have a beat, it’s multi-rhythmic. It’s expansive, it’s communal. It feels put together from the best parts of a bunch of disparate sounds that only make sense when they’re together.
It feels like it could be chanted. It loops and soars and doesn’t sound like it will ever need to stop, because it’s nothing as easy to know as lyric-chorus-lyric-chorus-bridge-chorus. It’s timeless, like it might have just been dug out of the ground, and it’s also joyous, like it might have been passed down to them from generations. It sounds like happily putting your arm around someone when you’re drunk and staring into a campfire.
So far they’ve only released a 4-song EP, I’ve listened to it constantly for two days. I demand a full-length album. …Please.
For now, stop what you’re doing and listen to my favourite tracks, “Dene Sled” and “Hallam Progress”:
Plus check out a grainy, colourful, almost pre-digital looking video, directed by Weber himself, for their single “Rooms.”
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There’s something about the intrinsic freedom and improv history that’s sewn into jazz that lends itself particularly well to experimental visuals. Without words to guide along a pre-determined narrative, we’re left with an ultimate freeflow; we decide for ourselves what the story behind the sounds is, and the director gets an ultimate carte blanche to create whatever visual story he or she wants.
Directed by Japanese director/animator Takafumi Tsuchiya (a.k.a. Takcom) for experimental jazz outfit Samurai Jazz Quintet, “Pico” is twitchy, graphic, dimension-shifting animation gem. It follows no convention or boundaries, just visualizes, with complete abandon, the sounds it has merged with.
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Via No Fat Clips
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I love the artistic study of the collision between the digital and organic, and the idea of a point where our physical evolution meets mutation and takes a shocking genetic leap forward. I’m drawn to depictions of that intersection where our microchips merge with our bodies, and how we’re forced to consider how the rest of us may react when the first of us transcend the boundary of the human and the mechanical and transform into an unimaginable new hybrid.
The new video for amazing alt-electronic outfit Delphic’s “Doubt” is a stunning physical metaphor for emotional mutation. Their faces and bodies crystalize, galvanize, and alchemize themselves against their emotional trauma and manifest into a physical protection for, and even aggression against, their new emotional world. Like second skins, metallic armours and cellular defenses slowly spread across their bodies.
Reminding me of the amazing genetic mutational imaginings of Lucyandbart, the vid is directed by another artist with experience in visualizing the future.I first discovered Andy Huang over two years ago with his spectacular short film “Doll Face”, a story of robotic narcissism that has to be seen to be believed, which he followed up with his sinister and disturbing “The Gloaming.”
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Via No Zap
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I hate to think of my music video tastes as a foregone conclusion, but this vid has the hallmarks of everything I love: retro, colour, pixellation, Cubism, profanity, electro, a hint of Bauhaus, and video game references. I can’t stop myself and nor would I want to.
Directed late in ’09 by London-based shop Mirrorshade for Toronto’s own (Polaris Prize nominees) Holy Fuck’s ’08 track “Royal Gregory.”
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Sia is one of those musicians who can pretty much do no wrong when it comes to videos. I loved her Claire Carre directed vid for “Soon We’ll Be Found”, and though not quite as esoteric as Björk or as fearless as Fever Ray, she’s definitely inside a pack of artists who take the video medium as an opportunity to do quality work that augments and enhances their music instead of merely presenting it.
In her latest Australian single, “You’ve Changed”, Sia took a more light-hearted, pop culture referenced route. Directed by Dennis Liu (who also created the mega-popular Mac video for The Bird & The Bee’s “Again and Again”), this parody of Rock Band has a makeshift, arts and crafts feel that makes the extreme nerdy awkwardness of it’s teenage “players” particularly bang on. Inventive through, it’s totally witty, loaded with winks to gamers, and even manages to be a little heartwarming and optimistic at the end.
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I love the phosphorescent, x-ray, almost 3D quality to the animation in this video, directed by Stéphane Berla, for French singer-songwriter Matthieu Chedid.
Via Antville
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