16 Military Wives (2005, 30MB, 4:48 min.)
Aaron Stewart-Ahn’s video for The Decemberists.
won the Music Video of 2006 at the Plug Awards.
By Mica Scalin.
Category Archives: music video
Seventeen Evergeen – Haven’t Been Yourself
Seventeen Evergeen (2006, 52MB, 4:08 min.)
Seventeen Evergeen “Haven’t Been Yourself (Lucky Number Music)”.
From their myspace.
Directed by Encyclopedia Pictura.
Man Mixes Sound on 2 GameBoys
Kid Quaalude -‘Upside Downer’ (2006, 37MB, 4:01 min)
“Well!”, as my dear mother used to say,
“What will they think of next?”
Neat film by Dave Whiting, shot in a rather
atmospheric former Tram depot in Weimar
& featuring Kid Quaalude doing what it
says on the tin.
Boy In Static – Where It Ends
Where It Ends (2007, 48.3MB, 4:09 min)
To my shame, never heard of Boy in Static before someone
called Alex sends us a nice e mail about this vid, directed by
Yoshi Sodeoka of c505, but video, music, both, turn out to
be rather lovely…
‘Lenin’ – with Meir Pichhadze by Doron Golan
Lenin (2006, 21.3MB, 3:50 min.)
‘Once while walking, Leo Tolstoy spotted in the distance the figure of a
man squatting and gesturing strangely; a madman, he thought, but on
drawing nearer he was satisfied that the man was attending to necessary
work, sharpening a knife on a stone. Lenin was fond of citing this example.’
Ygael Gluckstein (Tony Cliff ) – Lenin Vol 1
with Meir Pichhadze. music by Yehuda Poliker. movie by Doron Golan.
Brooklyn Snow Storm by Charlene Rule
Brooklyn Snow Storm (2006, 4.7 MB, 1:02 min.)
From scratchvideo.tv. drums: Robin Russell.
Brooklyn, New York. Outside my kitchen window.
Sunday, February 12, 2006. 3:30pm until 4pm.
Rob ‘Whitey’ McConnaughy – Panther and Destroyer
Destroyer (2005, 6.6 MB, 1:04 min.)
Panther (2005, 18.5 MB, 3 min.)
Two great shorts from director and cinematographer Rob ‘Whitey’
from his site – Whitey Films – a real live action documentary with
Crawford the Destroyer & an all-cardboard set
for Panther’s Music video – ‘You Don’t Want Your Nails Done.’
Exquisite Corpses
Exquisite Corpses (2006, 1.74MB, 39 sec)
Lashings of Gallic style from the
Marmotte Corporation.
The music is “My My Metrocard” from Le Tigre.
8 halfmile – Fellini remixed
8 halfmile (2006, 6.9MB, 2:21 min.)
“Fellini’s classic film re-mixed Eminem-style…”
by – The AV Club, from Film Threat.
Curt Cloninger: St Frank and the Wolf
St Frank and the Wolf (2007, 72MB, 6:21 min.)
Curt Cloninger is a clever, original & fearless commentator on new media art,
always worth reading for his eschewal (or at least extremely careful
chewing over) of received new media wisdom.
He also maintains the excellent lab404.com.
This is something a little different; a video record of a live performance piece.
Background from Curt:
‘The projected loops are pre-recorded, but they run in different synch
with each other and are modulated variably depending on the realtime
improvisational performance — so it’s a prescribed performance space
that is qualitatively different each performance. As the theremin
volume gets louder (as my realspace left hand gets higher), the
projected big hands get more opaque and their accompanying volume
gets louder. As the theremin volume gets lower (as my realspace left
hand gets lower), the smaller projected ghost hands get more opaque
and their accompanying volume gets louder.
…Legend has it that a wolf was attacking the town of Gubbio,
so St. Francis was called in to get it to stop. Francis brokered a
deal with the wolf where it agreed to stop attacking the people in
the town if they agreed to feed it and keep their dogs
from bothering it. In a similar spirit, this piece seeks to dialogue
with sound and light and come to some sort of consensus.
The piece is not trying to impose a “taming” order on the media,
nor is it letting the media run wild. It enters into a dialogue with
matter (sound and light in space) in order to modulate and be modulated
by it.’
Reasons to check this piece out despite its large file size:
(1) It has an oddness quotient of over 93%.
(2) The music is neat, bit like the rougher edged output of the
early minimalists plus, also, the generative/aleatoric
thing in music is a hard one to pull off & it’s well done here.
(3) Smart.
(4) It follows no fashion.
(5) It rejects irony – there is real human feeling here, sometimes verging on the ecstatic.