Friday, December 5, 2008  11:34 am 

Devil’s remix pt4 – Mi Ami & Dan Nixon

The forth of our Telepathe – Devil’s Trident remixes comes from Mi Ami, with a video by Dan Nixon.

Over to Dan-

Having your home flooded can do strange things to the mind. Shortly after the August ‘monsoon’ in Brighton, 20JFG sent me the Mi Ami remix of Telepathe’s Devil’s Trident and asked if I’d like to make a video for it. So, surrounded by all my (slightly damp) possessions and trying to sleep on the couch one night, I plugged in my headphones, fully intending to think of ideas while listening to the remix on repeat.

The remix is dense. Dense and layered and (I’d come to discover) incredibly intricate. Probably too intricate for my tired mind as I started to have the most intense ‘visions’ of trees and strobes and pagan rituals and other oddities no doubt influenced by the M.R. James book I was reading. This went on for about an hour. Finally snapping out of it I placed the headphones down beside me and fell into a deep sleep. In the morning I sketched out the video you see here.

[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/2227084[/vimeo]

Adventure – Unknown Track

This is the final track on Adventure’s 2007 self-titled album. Though I’m actually quite a sucker for ADD 8-bit music I like nothing more than when it transcends its functional roots and hints at something epic. This does that in spades. The melody is actually quite mournful but layered over the propulsive beats it perfectly encapsulates an almost nihilistic plunge through the deadly hordes of pixels that our ur-hero takes in the side-scrolling nirvana this track creates.

There’s something so plaintive about this though. I kinda’ want to tease out the resolve on the melody’s face rather than wash everything in a rapid cycle of primary colours. Giving it a mental pixel-art interpretation robs it of its most exhilarating quality: its glorious moments of release. It’s a cry for contrast and a recipe for the contradictions in these two paragraphs.

Hatchback – The Lotus and the Robot

This isn’t the ‘best’ track on Hatchback’s wonderful Colors of the Sun. Nor is it the most immediate but it is the one I’ve had the strongest emotional response to. Maybe it’s the Eno. That sunkissed synth loop. The naive melody the sounds like dips in a Balearic pool. Maybe it’s the pace. I’m pretty sure it’s the pace. Slow, deliberate building in stages. Not necessarily one thing at a time but one idea at a time. Calling out to each other like some alternate soundtrack to the end of Close Encounters.

Then the beat. Upping the ante but simply the kinetic response to the same languid dialogue as everything that led up to it.

5:30 – that’s it. That’s what this has been leading to. Without the pacing it’d be a lovely melody but with it, it’s something emotional. That indescribable synth calling over all that has come before it. I heard it properly for the first time riding on a train at sunset and came over all asymmetrically fringed.

[previously posted at Urlaubshits, I now discover]

Arthur Russell – Eli

This is about a dog. It’s by Arthur Russell so it’s also…indescribably beautiful.

I’ve been obsessed by music and video for pretty much my whole life. If you’re interested in any collaborations or would like me to create a music-video for you please get in touch. My website, which includes other work, is here

YouTube mixtape fun:

Popol Vuh – Improvisation (1971)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DON-CogKcfk[/youtube]
Il-Conformista – dance scene (1970)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KbD5W1qcDOY[/youtube]
K√°rhozat (1988)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=45py8pY_J1Q[/youtube]
Beau Travail (1999)
[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I[/youtube]

all blog images today taken from videos by Dan Nixon.

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As a sidenote to Dan’s wonderfully weird woodland wanders if you head on over to Viceland today you will find that XXJFG have made an infiltration. It’s going to be a weekly thing so be sure to check it out. Kind regards.

Also thank you to everyone who voted to bestow upon us the accolade of Best Blog at the Record of the Day Awards last week. We’d like to thank the little baby Jesus, George W, and the world in general.

labels >> Adventure, Hatchback, Mi Ami, arthur russell, dan nixon, telepathe video

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