Posts in Video

I’ve been meaning to post something about Fischerspooner for a while, they’re definitely one of my favorite electronic bands. They also have a very good visual sensibility with a lot of great design / imagery surrounding their releases. The top image is from their latest album, the middle is Casey Spooner, and the last is the video for Fischerspooner’s cover of Wire’s classic The 15th. Certainly my favorite FS song. Since Youtube sound quality is terrible, I’ve posted the MP3 itself below.

Fischerspooner – The 15th

Leaving early a.m. this morning so spent the night getting prepped and packed for Toronto. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be speaking at FITC and playing a couple live shows. For the live stuff I’ll be doing an all new visuals set using a new piece of software I’ve completely fallen in love with. It’s the most enjoyable app I’ve come across, maybe ever. It’s a modular video app called VDMX and it blows the doors off anything I’ve ever used for the purposes of live video. You can essentially design the way it works to your liking, you design the interface and the functionality. There’s a bit of a learning curve but once you get over that you start to realize how powerful it can be. At $300 it’s not super cheap, but considering the feature set and functionality it’s well worth it. It can do quartz composer effects and blending modes all in real-time. 

I am using a Novation Remote SL and footpedals to control most of the parameters of the video portion, and a the same Novation with split parameters to control another laptop running Ableton Live. I’m also routing a set of audio outputs from Live to VDMX which then analyzes the incoming sound and modulates various parameters based on the amplitude of selected frequency ranges. Somehow VDMX is able to do this all in real time, I’m still not quite sure how.

There’s a show Saturday and Sunday night, I’m hoping to video tape the show on Sunday night at the Drake but it remains to be seen if we can track down someone to tape it on short notice. If you or anyone you know has proper video equipment and some skills to go along with it, let me know.

Air are, of course, one of the better bands to come around in the past 20 years. They blessed us with 3 albums full of some the best synth work ever recorded (I don’t particularly care for most of their latter day work). My favorite album is a collection of singles released between 1995 and 1997 entitled Premiers Symptômes. Words can’t describe this, so just have a listen. I am sure most of you have heard this album, but it’s so good I thought it warranted a post even 11 years after the fact. And the album cover is so amazing, it should get a post all to itself

Also, click the live shot below the cover for a very cool short documentary entitled Eating, Sleeping, Waiting and Playing: A Film About Air on Tour: Soundcheck, New York via Pitchfork.tv.

Air – Les Professionales

1978 Jackson Five video for "Blame It On The Boogie" complete with cool old school video effects and Michael in his dancing prime. If only we could have this MJ back, the world would be a better place.

This is a two part post: partly to announce that Pitchfork.tv has launched and is awesome, and partly because I love the M83 video for Graveyard Girl. There’s also a lot of other great videos up there, especially if you like to watch Thom Yorke rock the drums in versus mode.

This So-Me directed video for Justice’s DVNO features a somewhat similar style to the Oscilliscopy Catalog from a couple days ago. Justin posted this in the comments and also included a link to a high res MOV version here.

The video is basically a remix of a bunch of old logos, some interesting stuff. I personally think the whole thing is a bit clean, would have been nicer if they did it with authentic techniques or just put a little more effort into grunging it up a bit. But perhaps they were going for this style, or perhaps they didn’t have the 2 years it would surely take to make this with mechanical video effects. At any rate, a fun clip, and below it is an interesting French spot featuring more of the same oscilloscope-styled graphics.

Joaquim has made a short documentary detailing his trip to Stockholm for the ISO50 Workshop there this past January. Above are parts 1 & 2. Part 2 has some brief footage of the workshop itself. Thanks Joaquim!

This one is for the audio geeks among us. While I was in Austin I got to play around with my friend Beamer’s Arduino Sequencer prototype (see video above). This thing is really fun and has some very interesting features. We both have the Doepfer MAQ-16 which has it’s strengths, but overall is sort of disappointing so I’ve been looking for a replacement. Hopefully Beamer gets his Arduino into production soon, would love to take this on the road.

The Matrix Synth blog posted about the video, there are also some pictures and more info on the sequencer.

Paddy Duke sent in this great video about Fractals.

"Arthur C. Clarke presents this unusual documentary on the mathematical discovery of the Mandelbrot Set (M-Set) in the visually spectacular world of fractal geometry. This show relates the science of the M-Set to nature in a way that seems to identify the hand of God in the design of the universe itself. Dr. Mandelbrot in 1980 discovered the infinitely complex geometrical shape called the Mandelbrot Set using a very simple equation with computers and graphics."

Found this on Youtube.  By Joaquim who, if I’m not mistaken, comments on this blog now and then.