Video of the Week – Star Slinger: Mornin’

Continuing my theme of summery videos to combat the winter blues, here comes a slice of pure sunny joy courtesy of White Noise favourite Star Slinger, accompanied by a gorgeous and trippy video. Enjoy!

The way these images are treated and distorted, with kaleidoscopic visuals penetrating pastel-shaded, sun-drenched clips is a perfect expression of the track’s easy groove. Tiny details set in perfect synch to the sound, such as ghosted colour overlays of the girl, punch-drunk camera tilts and that superb lift-door opening moment compliment the song’s powerful joy to great effect, and leave us with this pure gem of a video.

Video of the Week: Teeth - Shawty

This week’s video is Teeth’s strange video for his fantastic single from earlier this year, Shawty. It’s a very spare track, with a repeating vocal sample (cropped from Beyonce’s introduction to her Gaga-collab Videophone), creepy rising synths and punchy percussion, and it’s definitely one of my personal picks from all the fantastic singles released this year. Not only does Teeth deserve this accolade, but the clips of 80s romance and make-up commercials are funny and twisted, making a great and unexpected accompaniment to the track.

There’s something very sexy about Beyonce’s vocals echoing out over the barren soundscape, and this is echoed in the visuals of beautiful women from the 80s, all involved in clips about image; whether they are make-up and hair adverts, call girls or just posing for the camera. The resulting combination of the audio and video is more than a little unsettling, but it’s also got a funny side to it, and the clips generally seem to be very well precisely edited into place. It’s not a video which gives you a huge amount to say, but it works brilliantly, and is part of the growing trend of refiguring old (and more often than not quasi-sexual) video clips to new dance tracks, which has aroused quite a lot of controversy in certain circles. More than anything, it’s a great atmospheric accompaniment to a brilliant tune, and on that basis alone Shawty earns its position as Video of the Week.

Previous videos:
Shlohmo - Couch (Soosh Remix)
Balam Acab - Apart
Max Richter - On The Nature of Daylight
Shlohmo - Sink
Avalanches - Since I Left You

The Flaming Lips –Powerless

Seekae - Void

Video of the Week: Shlohmo – Couch (Soosh remix)

It’s the second entry for Shlohmo into the video of the week, but his image-rich sounds just seem to inspire some great visual pieces. This time it’s a new official video for Soosh’s remix of Couch on the upcoming re-release of the Shlo-Fi EP.

This is a minimal film for a relatively minimal song. The camera pans incredibly slowly over the prone body of a girl in a mask, and the monochrome suits the ghostly tune to a tee. What really impresses about this video is the accumulation of minute visual effects in line with every subtle shift in the instrumentation, a swelling at the deep bass resonance, a sideways stretch on the bassline and horizontal lines blurring the image on the ethereal rising synthline. As the effects accumulate they begin to warp the image in a recognisable looped pattern, but the effects are always subtle enough to impact quietly rather than to take over the whole video. It closes with the girl’s eyes closing as if to sleep, ending a remarkably understated but undeniably beautiful video.

Previous videos:
Balam Acab - Apart
Max Richter - On The Nature of Daylight
Shlohmo - Sink
Avalanches - Since I Left You

The Flaming Lips –Powerless

Seekae - Void

Video of the week: Balam Acab – Apart

Anyone who regularly follows this blog will know how much I love Balam Acab, and in fact I still regard Wander / Wonder as my album of the year to date. Although the LP was a highly emotionally interpretable and sonically lush collection, to date this is the only fan-made video I’ve found that really does his sound justice.

This video for Apart tells a very simple story; that of breaking through a barrier and in doing so, gaining the possibility at fulfilling an unrequited love. Simple it may be, but it’s really in the craftsmanship and detail of this piece that the video excels. A beautiful stop-motion with a muted palette and gorgeous natural images, the video introduces itself by delving into a single drop of water just as the song proper begins, implying the presence of beautiful secret worlds that exist unseen in every hidden corner and unobserved facet of the natural world. A flower grows in a single droplet and rises up, a delicate and beautiful skater who dances elegantly inside her frozen world. A dandelion seed enters the magical world and is transformed, as she was, into the lover, as another part of nature come to life. Just as he sees her and the music slows, a wall of ice is constructed between the two and he laments his love, railing powerfully against his fate. His sense of loss is so strong that it produces a physical effect and breaks down the wall to enter hopefully into her world, cheering not at the achievement of his love, but at the possibility now offered to him. Throughout the music compliments both the visual action and style superbly, and the video stands as a beautiful and nuanced love letter to the secret worlds that exist in nature and our imagination, just as Wander / Wonder does across its course. 

Video of the Week: Max Richter – On The Nature of Daylight

This week I’ve decided to leave actual music videos and instead show a ballet piece choreographed by David Dawson, set to Max Richter’s On The Nature of Daylight from his superb album The Blue Notebooks. Along with Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Richter is for me one of the most interesting artists fusing classical compositions with the increased scope of electronic production, and although his work strays much further towards the classical side, he is cited as an influence by countless contemporary electronic artists.

I’m not going to pretend to know a great deal about ballet, but even from an outsider’s perspective the idea of expressing emotions and relationships solely through movement is an intriguing proposition, and the feelings depicted by this piece are by no means obscure or difficult for someone unfamiliar with ballet to interpret. The dancers move with remarkable grace and poise, and the vague narrative of their relationship is set perfectly to Richter’s achingly mournful suite. I won’t go into interpretations of the dance because I don’t know a great deal about the form, but I hope you can enjoy the expressive piece and that this is a breath of fresh air. 

Video of the Week: Shlohmo – Sink

I’m surprised it’s already been a month since I started this little side project. To celebrate, I think we should take a little step into the stranger side of home-made fan videos. Here are some gorgeous and intriguing visuals set to one of my favourite tracks of the year, Shlohmo’s lush and blissed-out Sink.

The chilled out grooves commence in time with an intriguing artistic procedure; faces forming and seemingly building themselves up with flowing paint in stop motion. The beautiful colours and textures on display match Shlohmo’s intensely lush sound perfectly, while showing the artistic process reflects the analogue qualities to his sound; record hiss and percussive clicks. As the fantastic Oriental flute melodies unfold, the scene elaborates; cut-outs swirl in hypnotic liquid and faces construct and deconstruct themselves before your eyes. The screen becomes more and more crowded with colours, hands and objects, paper cut-outs are dragged across the ground, characters sketch themselves into existence with exuberance. The editing throughout is superb, creating an entirely unique vision that accompanies the song flawlessly. It’s a homage to artistic process and individual vision, and it’s absolutely beautiful to watch. Enjoy!

Video of the Week: The Avalanches - Since I Left You

For the third weekly video instalment, I’ve picked pretty much my very favourite video, for what is essentially my very favourite song. For me, this video constitutes a wonderful idea that has been executed flawlessly and, crucially, adds a whole new dimension to the music without removing any of its original qualities. So follow the story and enjoy!

After the first time I watched this video I found myself wanting to watch it again almost immediately. 

We are essentially confronted by two people in a desperate situation who are faced with death. As the voice rings out 'welcome to paradise' they catch a glimpse and enter this other world, a shining dancehall with a dusty, aged quality. It feels like a space beyond space and time, added to the fact that this afterlife is shown in colour throughout, and 'real life' relegated to black and white. At the opening and close of the video there is a birdcage, an important symbol which I feel reflects one man's journey through transcending life, leaving the cage, and the decision of the other to stay. One miner begins to dance, tentatively at first but quickly gaining skills and soon after the judges are impressed and he seems very happy. Meanwhile, the miner who did not choose this death stands by the side simply playing the tambourine. One could say the dancing miner has indeed 'found a world so new' in opening himself up to a possibility, and it is a beautiful idea to make this moment of perfect happiness a scene of a death. The video combines human joy in spontaneity, sweetly pitched questions on the afterlife, and the universal love of dance to craft something truly extraordinary.

Pitchfork commented that like their music, this video “is about transforming the disparate and the out-of-place into something new and joyful”, and I couldn’t agree more; the incongruous miners mimic the strange samples blended into a smooth whole throughout their landmark LP. This is a beautifully simple, optimistic and touching video that I’ve rewatched so many times but has never once lost its power or sweetness. I really hope you enjoy it, see you next week with a new video.

Previous videos:

The Flaming Lips –Powerless

Seekae - Void

Video of the Week: The Flaming Lips - Powerless

For the second installation of my new video feature, I’ve chosen The Flaming Lips’ curious and beautiful video for Powerless¸ from their 2009 album Embryonic. In last week’s video I discussed how the visual can be tied to the musical in order to create an emotional effect, but here I’m focussing more on the aesthetics of a music video, and how vague symbols can be used to resonate with a wide audience.

The most obvious comment to be made here is that the video has an utterly unique visual tone, with a muted colour palette and extraordinary shots, often incorporating clever lens flares to give a sense of the heat and isolation of the woman’s situation. Aside from looking lush and visually striking, the video also appears to make an ambiguous point about the concept of power. The woman is intensely sexualised from the very start, wearing a tee shirt and tiny hot pants, with the occasional crotch-shot adding to the image. This sexuality is juxtaposed slightly unappealingly by the fact that she is tied up and trying to get free, creating the idea of a sexual object without any freedom. Then added to the situation is the monkey staring at her, perhaps symbolising the masculine oppressor watching over her, perhaps there’s an alternate reading of its role too. As Coyne intones “No one is ever really powerless” she calms and begins a transformation in perfect timing with the taut guitar riffs, and the visual effect of her body essentially glitching and transforming is a very arresting one. Transformation complete, she is no longer tied up, and desperately claws her way from her restraints and flees, dancing and rejoicing in her new freedom of movement. However, although she acts as if she is now free she does not take off her blindfold, and she is still watched over by her simian oppressor. Is this freedom or just an illusion of freedom in a wider prison? Either way, the video is extraordinary in its visual atmosphere, as well as giving you a lot to chew on intellectually, even if it doesn’t give any concrete answers.

Video of the Week: Seekae - Void

This is the first in a new series of posts, in which I’m going to pick out some of my favourite music videos and put them up here for anyone to see. I’ve always been really interested in how beautiful and thought-provoking music videos can be, as marriages of the audio and the visual. It’s disappointing that so many are high-budget and poorly conceived advertising pieces, because the artistic potential in setting a series of moving images to music gives you a power to collage and infer in a way you can’t in your average film or TV show where narrative is the most important thing. I’ve seen a fair amount of great music videos in my time, and I think they’re worth sharing if anyone is interested. As a side-note, I’m not differentiating between official and fan-made videos, they both carry the same artistic value for me. Enjoy!

The video I’ve chosen to open this feature is for Void by Seekae, the Australian electronic trio with two good LPs to their name. I’m not sure if it’s an official or fan-made video, but whoever put it together has created something really special. The lush and transcendent piece is expertly applied to a collage of images from the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, which broke up and exploded, killing all of its crew, just over a minute after launch. The result is an immensely moving visual piece, carefully edited with the gravity of the preparations, the immensity  of the launch, and the catastrophe of the crash all synchronising perfectly with the music as a single work. Not only are the visual clips chosen aesthetically beautiful, but they have been sequenced wonderfully, for example the looped man foretelling of the explosion before the song begins, a dark precursor to the accident that is bound to fill the viewer with dread. This makes the smiling images of the astronauts getting on unbearably painful, and the majesty of the launch sequence shadowed by the real death that proceeded it. The fact that these are real images weighs heavily on the viewer, and reading around the subject makes it all the more tragic; for example learning the fact that the fair-haired woman in the video wasn’t even an astronaut, she was a teacher who had a won a competition from thousands to be the first teacher in space, only to end up burning up in the shuttle. It’s a sobering and affecting video, but proves more than anything the artistic capabilities of the music video, and how far beyond a puff-piece the format can be taken.

I hope you find the video interesting, there will be another one next week.