Here’s the five favourite music videos (from the last five years) Chris chose while I…
Category: Interview
Recently coming across Semiconductor‘s video for Double Adaptor on Osaka Recordings I found a thing of rare digital beauty. It gave me cause to reevaluate their work after viewing a performance by them a number of years ago at the Brighton Dome. I found their work at that time intriguing but not stand out. The execution wasn’t to my taste, and the processing power and software tools were not yet up to the task of what the group wanted to create.
A few years makes a world of difference… Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt have refined their creative process and technique and are creating custom DVD and moving image installations at galleries across Europe infused with a more fine arts-based aesthetic. They’ve moved from being glitch art performancers into a more rarefied air as purveyors of exquisitely realised sonic visuals.
In 200 Nanowebbers, vector shapes and painstakingly applied layers of hand-drawn animation evoke a quantum-powered molecular dance. The mutating graphic structure is allied to Double Adaptors live soundtrack using custom-scripted code, to grow and mutate a blossoming pastel-hued web.
The video inspired me to query Semiconductor about the video. I’d like to thank them for graciously waiting while I processed and finally published the answers…
Colder‘s To The Music video by UVA is a striking promo treatment where sound and image are totally in keeping with each other. I’ve worked with and commissioned pieces from Colder’s Marc Nguyen Tan previously (he has a background as an art director, creating impressive graphic and motion pieces as Dotmov and le cabinet), so it is intriguing to see how United Visual Artists interpret the singer and his work after Marc has previously been so in control of his visual look.
The generative process and custom software UVA use to create the video frames elicits a fragile, flickery, and lo-tech electronic image of the singer and a female dancer. They jitter in and out of the dusky red-black ether, forms in a state of flux captured and then broken back into digital bits. The edgy transfer of black and white scanlines into faces and figures offer a perfect parallel to the vocals that float in and out of the mix. Try to grab at any meaning and the 3D forms threaten to swirl into nothingness.
The minimalist art/music videos by Karl Kliem under the label, Dienststelle, are some of the purist examples of the form. Clean, and fluid, they cleanse the palette after seeing too many saturated colours and choppy cuts.
I asked Karl Kliem, the director a few questions about his work.