Ok, ok, it’s not ‘new’ new but it’s less than a year old and that’s kinda new, right? Last year my good friend and esteemed mucker DJ Johnny Clash asked me to supply a VJ mix for a 30 minute DJ mix he was asked to provide for Uncommon Sense x Deadstream broadcast which was on Twitch on July 23rd 2022. We both waited to wait until that excellent stream had got all the views it would without detracting from it by posting up another version and, well, after 10 months I reckon we’re ok now. ;) Visuals were created in synaesthesia live in which I ran through the set end to end and recorded a few passes (to keep it with a live feel about it) and then edited with some DJ footage I asked JC to provide to give it a human touch. After all, It’s always a delight to see JC’s face :)
Tracklisting
Faizal Mostrixx - Agada Yil Kuwade [East African Records] Ahadadream - KOYAL [R&S] Swordman Kitala, K-Lone - Malanga Ja [Blip Discs] OMAAR - Prince Rorro [More Time] Sho Madjozi & She's Drunk - Amadoda (Shy One Remix) [Through My Speakers] Griffit Vigo ft DJ Ree - Club Bang Snare [Apparel Records] Menchess - Point Blank (gqom tech) [Gqom Oh!] Phelimuncasi (prod DJ Nhlekzin) - I don't feel my legs [Nyege Nyege Tapes] SNØW feat Kuenta - Yeke Yeke [More Time] Al Wootton - Body Healthy [TRULE]
Last night Echaskech premiered a new audio visual set at the https://www.awamutogether.co.uk/2020 House Party - a three day stream of audio and visual entertainment to help raise money for the Awamu Charity which helps orphaned and vulnerable children in the slums of Kampala to get the education and skills that are vital to their future.
That set is now available for you to watch in your own time and leisure! The audio is from Echaskech’s performance at the Sundeck in Margate in 2019, i added the visual layer built out of the elements I’ve been constructing for the tracks over the years (featuring the visual work of Mantissa and Switzon S Wigfall III).
You can nip over to youtube and watch it again and again and again… (preferably from different IPs and using different yt accounts… Oh! No reason)
A bit of a new venture here - I’ve never done any multicam stuff and always wanted to! Echaskech got booked to play at an outdoor gig at sundown so there wasn’t much of a visual requirement for me to fulfil so I came down and rigged some cameras and filmed the whole thing. Echaskech played an absolute blinder and this piece of improvisation was captured. Massive thanks to Solarwaves for the go pro foootage, Joshu Posthuman for the loan of the zoom cam and walkpro3D for the walking and dancing projections.
As part of my continuing and seemingly never ending fascination with Bob Ross, here is episode 1 from season 31 with (along side the intro and outro) just the colours/colors or the word colour/color mentioned. Don't ask because I don't know. But I do know there's a lot more of these to come so you better just get used to it.
Following the upload of 'Friends Season 1 overlaid' (and the subsequent removal of it) I thought I'd try the same trick with US painting legend and guaranteed sleep aid: Bob Ross. This is every episode of season 31 (apart from the one with Steve, I mean... who needs Steve?) overlaid with a 10% opacity for each episode and a lighten blend applied. To give the episodes an anchor point all the episodes are approximately lined up when Bob says, "Let start..." The result is... trippy, but relaxing which is easily one of my favourite states to be in.
It's taken me a surprising two days to make this but the idea is to do the whole 300 odd episodes as one overlay (but not the ones with Steve, because, well, come on... not Steve*) so as long as I don't get sued and I find lots and lots of spare time I might do that.
*Steve is a great painter - possibly better than his father Bob - but he breaks the patterns here. And he keeps me awake.
There's a couple of videos out there that already explore the idea that Michel Gondry's iconic video is palindromic so I started with that , but I wanted to also represent the idea of - as Introducing live are a band covering Daft Punk - other people covering the video (of which there are quite a few if you spend days on You Tube searching them out) and that is the latter segment (sort of people from around the world doing the dance from "around the world") but when I got the audio from the band (I'd been using the Daft Punk track as guide audio) I realised that they play a little insert from "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger". Not wanting to repeat my earlier HBFS video (which also tries to show the incredible creative fandom that exists around Daft Punk) I explored the idea of improvement and - after working on another video project where I'd worked on (and abandoned) a master-cut of 80s TV shows - my brain pushed the two ideas together and came up with the homage to the bionic man and woman that just works so well with this section.
Daft Punk's Robot Rock is, well... a bit dull and repetitive - quite apt for a robot song about robots - and personally I think Introducing Live's version is much better, primarily because they can add in more dynamic range into the performance. As soon as I knew that this track was in the set list I knew what I wanted to do: a compilation of movie robots! I started to make my own and then wondered if anyone had already done this already and lo (the internet provides) I found three 'history of movie robots' videos which I sliced and diced, retimed and corrected to the audio and added a bit of Electroma foootage at the end, but really most of the exceptional hard work and credit should go to Jonathan Mann's "Every movie robot..." video
Hi all! It gives me great pleasure to let you know about this video of Echaskech's 'The Knowledge" which was premiered at this years Awamu at Together's festival. Hope you enjoy it!
Ok so I decided to upload a few more videos from the quite awesome "A Few Old Tunes" Boards of Canada influences night, so to make them more easily accessible, (and to stop me from having to write 5 new posts, one for each video) I've created an Album on Vimeo for you so you can watch them in the comfort of your home. Consider it a short day in the life of a Boards of Canada fan.
Here's the link to the Vimeo Album (couch mode)
I've just uploaded a simple video shot from the top of the Mori Tower in Roppongi Hills, Toyko, during our Trip to Japan in Spring 2013. Music is by Freescha off their LP Freeschaland. It was shot in real time and then sped up in FCP, I've added some colour correction and some 16mm grain to warm it up. The pan and scan is all in post. I wanted the sun to be set when the vocal refrain kicked in to remind us that, even though the Sun is Set, it's still high in the sky. :) This was made to be shown at the Boards Of Canada Influences night " A Few Old Tunes" at Catch on Kinglsand Road, Shoreditch, London June 20th.
Along with Echaskech's BT Tower Video and the Sepalcure's London Eye video I think I might have a thing for locked off single shot time lapsed videos from tall buildings. ;)
Following on from the Send in the Drones mix, here's the video that inspired the last track in that mix
The BT Tower has always been a symbol of the future, of technology and progress; it's a unique and outstanding feature on the London Skyline and even as a kid I always wanted to visit the top, especially the revolving restaurant. However, due to threats of terrorism in the 80's, it got shut down and I thought that opportunity was closed to me, until (thanks to my employer, the NSPCC) Late last year I was given the chance to work on a Charity event at the BT Tower, an opportunity I jumped at.
The film is of two revolutions , one during the day and one at night. Each revolution takes about 20 minutes and so the footage has been sped up about 10 times. The initial edit was done without music and then passed to Echaskech who the constructed the soundtrack to match my edits, I then did some fine tuning and the result is what you see. The title of the piece, "626" is the height of the BT Tower in feet.
p.s. there will be a you tube version, but later and when I can be arsed, cos You tube really does look pony compared to vimeo
Ok there's lots to tell you about this week. First off please accept my apologies for no update last weekend - I was with Echaskech at Deershed 2011 as part of Just Music's day up there, (along with lable mates Digitonal and Laki Mera) but more on that later. Last Friday morning Echaskech, along with the vocal talents of Napoleon Complex, released their new track, "Change the Station" as a free download from Soundcloud. My video for it is on the Echaskech youtube page
As well as on my Vimeo page,
both available in glorious 720p. Initially I wanted to visually represent Napoleon's desire to make his point about broadcast news. The first idea was to have Napoleon being the one holding the bill board/placard, gagged. The idea being that the act of protesting would be his message, and even as an individual it could still be done, but sadly Napoleon lives in Naples, Italy (hence the name) so we changed it to just be Dom, representing Echaskech, or the music supporting what Napoleon has to say. Dom holding up the placard with Napoleon on it is a metaphor of Echaskech's music supporting Napoleon's lyrics. Shooting took place over the easter weekend on my trusty Panasonic HDC HS300 (we got Napoleon to film himself and send us the footage) and the editing was done in Final Cut Pro, then round tripped into After Effects to comp Napoleon on to the placard by Dom and then back to mine for a final treatment in FCP. We're all very happy and proud of it.
Deershed must be one of the most child friendly festivals I've even been to. We reckoned that the children out numbered the adults 2 to 1, the average age of the audience must've been about 12 years old. On Saturday night, at 11pm, just as we were ready to go out on the tented town and party, all the entertainment stopped and by 11:20pm the arena was a ghost town... quite an eerie experience for a old festival vet like my self. However as our soundcheck was at 8.30am(!) it was probably for the best.
Though we were playing at 1pm on a blisteringly bright Sunday afternoon, I was relieved to see that Deershed had sourced a properly dark tent for us to perform in, which meant that i hadn't traipsed up with my vj rig in tow for another wasted journey, only to watch the boys play from the sidelines. Much thanks to the lovely people at Deershed and at Just Music for making it a very special day for us all. And then, if that wasn't enough, Just Music announce that one of the Echaskech tracks "The Calm" is to be included on Linn Records "Just Music exclusive" compilations. Yes, that's right: the same Linn records that orginally signed The Blue Nile. How awesome is that?
Anyway, now on to the podcasts, which there are two of, this week. first off is the one I couldn't upload last weekend due to Deershed - BTM20110720 - and secondarily the one from this week, which is BTM20110727. There you go, 3 hours of music for you. :) And here are the
Umber - A Song for Two Seasons
Biosphere - Shika-1
Future 3 - A Sound
65daysofstatic - Debutante
I'm not a Gun - Never Meant to Be
Radiohead - No Surprises
Echaskech & Napoleon Complex - Crusader
Tim Exile - Carouselle
Untold - Don't Know. Don't Care
Scuba - Tense
XXXY - Blue Flashing Lights
Jack Sparrow - Loveless
Sigha - Expansions
Pangaea - Coiled
Chechan - Siberia
Perverelist - Infinity is now
Machine Drum - Mean Mean
Adam F (footwork edit) - Circles
Omni Trio (footwork edit) - Renegade Snares
Bibio - Saint Christopher
It's been a while since I uploaded any video of merit. I suppose I felt that after the Quiet Voices show in January 2010 I couldn't top that, so (apart from some minor live footage) I didn't really done any filming in 2010. Well thats changing in 2011 - plans are already rolling for some major video works, this year so "Keep 'em peeled" as Shaw Taylor used to say (and if you don't know who Shaw Taylor is well... jfgi. ;) First up on the video front was an unexpected one - a week before my birthday I learnt that I'd won some tickets to The London Eye, courtesy of The Thames Festival on the condition that they were used by Feb 24th. Not wanting to miss this opportunity to do something cinematic with it , my wife and I wanted to either catch a Sunset or a night time ride so I could film it and Miko could take some pictures. However the weather wasn't being our friend. Each day rolled by and the blanket of dull, grey skies (OH HAI nimbostratus!) seemed like it would never break. What we wanted was the pressure to drop (opening up the skies to more exciting cloud formation) and a warm front start to move in from the west, preferably around tea time. It looked like it wasn't to be until the very last day of our ticket, so on 24th April, I managed to take an hour off work early and I met up with Miko at The Eye at 5pm. just as the sun was rolling over the horizon. We exchanged our tickets and queued... and prayed that we got on the ride before the sunset got any good. I think that we got the perfect view
I apologise for the reflections; in my haste to set up the camera - after my manfrotto camera arm got confiscated because it was a "security hazzard" (harrumph!) luckily the guerrilla pod (oh the irony) wasn't deemed a risk - I completely forgot to set up a hood to block out the movement the curved pod glass would capture, but I don't think it distracts too much from the piece... well, not if you look at the sky. ;) The music - which is so goddamned perfect for the piece, both emotionally and in length - is by Brooklyn based future garage genius's Sepalcure, who have featured in a number of Back to Mine's recently and will continue to do so, I'm sure. Please stop by the gift shop on your way out and buy their EP (on the awesome Hotflush recordings).
