Posts in Video

I know, I know, flash mobs are so last year. But I hadn’t seen this one yet and thought it was a good example of the concept as art. This must have been a pretty surreal scene to randomly stumble into, although I would have to think that most New Yorkers are pretty jaded to these sorts of stunts by now. The real trick would have been to do this in the 1930’s or 40’s. It would have caused a city-wide panic, people would think it was the rapture or something.

I’ve never seen one of these in person, but here in San Francisco I’ve witnessed Critical Mass a few times. It’s a pretty amazing sight to behold except for the part where I can’t walk across Valencia to get a falafel.

Headphone time: The language in this video is potentially NSFW.

I don’t know where I stumbled on to this video, but It’s amazing, hilarious, and insightful all at the same time. Judging from the title I thought I was about to be subjected to some sort of right-wing rant about morals and values in America, little did I know I was actually in for a very down to earth lesson in design. I really like this guy’s attitude and it’s rare that you hear someone speak so frankly and unpretentiously about design. In my opinion, he hits the nail on the head with this and I couldn’t agree more. Even if you don’t agree with him, you absolutely must agree with the Futura titling.

I don’t have much info on this, but apparently it’s a trailer from an upcoming series called The Draplin Project featuring a guy named Aaron Draplin. Aaron’s site is full of interesting stuff and some very nice examples of industrial modernist design. I’ve posted the poor quality YouTube version above for ease of viewing, but you can also download the hi-res Quicktime version from Jess Gibson’s site.

I wouldn’t normally post something like this, but it is Friday and this is pretty good. I am having bad flashbacks from my freelance days, sort of in the same vein as this. Enjoy the weekend, but if you have clients like these, I am sure you’ll be stressing all the way through it anyways.

While I was in Detroit for DEMF last month I taped a segment for Current TV as part of a feature on Ghostly International (the label which I record for as Tycho). The feature is a good introduction to what Ghostly is about and includes some interviews with a few artists (Osbourne, Kate Simko, and myself).

Yes, it was a bit early and I think I’d had one coffee too many for that interview; no, I don’t know why there are random clips of me taking pictures of dumpsters. A couple of the pictures I was taking in those clips are included in the Detroit DEMF post. There’s also a clip of some of the actual DEMF set towards the end. The whole experience was a bit surreal; I played the opening set at DEMF around 1pm after a long night, was weird to be playing outdoors, in the early afternoon like that. The coolest part was that you could see Canada from the stage (look across the river in the shot from behind).

Original video link

Skalpel are a jazz duo from Poland on Ninja Tunes, they sample 50s-70s Polish Jazz and piece together tracks. I always liked the video for this song and the raw lo-fi recording did it for me everytime. It reminds me of The Avalanches alil but not as uptempo, i’ll post something from them soon.

Skalpel – Sculpture

This is either absolutely brilliant, or absolutely insane. Either way it’s great. It’s a video and remix of Radiohead’s Nude featuring some nice shots of vintage machines and seemingly composed mostly of sounds from those machines. Update: here’s a Vimeo link to the video.

Update #2: Radiohead posted about the video on their blog today. Congrats James! (thanks joe for the link)

Video by James Houston. Via Jesse Woodward

Krautrock + Orange = Good.

That last post (particularly the OEPBS Ident) reminded me of this bonus video from the Japanese version of Boards of Canada’s Trans Canada Highway EP.

WARNING: The end is somewhat NSFW.

A small collection of Network Identifications from the 60’s-80’s. I always loved the synthesizer work on these and the mechanical video effects are something you just can’t fake. The second one down is the OEPBS (Oregon PBS) sign off from the 80’s. The beginning is just the standard PBS ident, but watch until 0:35 and you’ll seen their own amazing logo animation complete with warbling analog synth melody.

This has me feeling a bit dated, I remember vividly each of these (with the exception of the Oregon PBS Ident).

Here’s an incredible video of Elliott Smith apparently recording Angeles live in a living room. Amazing that they’re getting such great sound from one mic picking up both the guitar and the vocals. I use 3 mics just to capture one acoustic guitar, which might be overkill. I have been experimenting with mic’ing drums using just one condenser room mic placed at a good distance and a dynamic on the bottom of the snare only with decent results. (thanks to Dusty Brown for that technique)