Call me crazy but I kinda would spend the rest of my life trying to play this style of music live with a band and simultaneously trying to pull similar style visuals on the fly. I really dig.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
uH!
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4 comments:
wow...as the killer beastie boys sample around 6:45 says: "THAZ SOME FUNKY SHIT. I love how this vj is collagin it. Really shamelessly sampling other creative footage that has really high production value to start out with.
Then I also love the way the flow of time is distorted...this is especially apparent with the all the footage of people dancing to "Cisco Kid", but seems like it's going on throughout. Seems like it's being scratched with ms. pinky or something similar. The flow distortion isn't really like the standard DJ scratching, though, where the rhythm is created with a lot of quick reversing and re-reversing of the sample. It's a lot more similar to the way lil Mike from Birdy Nam Nam scratches - yeah, there's back and forth insofar as he spins back the record, but you don't hear the sound of the record reversing. instead, the rhythm comes from the way he modulates the forward play, warping the speed of it, and cutting the volume in and out. dope. same kinda distortion here with the video samples.
i like the way the vj pulls from a lot of different sources but keeps some consistant visual tonality - i know that sounds wanky, but I don't know how else to describe it. Everything has this sorta surreality to it by combining a sorta regular thing with some kinda vaguely David Carsonish touches - blurs, washed out color or tv interference. it's good shit
I also like how he has a little group of clips for each part of the song. It makes for a more engaging visual narrative. Individually some of the clips might not seem to go with the song, but it works out that the sum effect of say, 6 unrelated scenes all juxtaposed work together to evoke a mood consistent with that part of the song. It's a lot more engaging than a VJ that say, loops some visuals and layers others, creating some kind of ever shifting visual dreamscape that's really just using muddy technique and ambiguous content as a copout cuz they don't know really what they want to express. I'm not saying that overlaying moving images is inherently lame (far from it - you guys are making it awesome) but rather that some mediocre VJs do it in a lame fashion and that this style of hard cuts from individual scene to scene is just ballsier by design, cuz there's no hiding in a psychedelic soup of melting images.
Super cleanliness to all this. And you bes' know that during the "Cisco Kid" scene those dance moves are FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS. *I constantly think of Carl Winepop @ around 6:53*
Anyways, in addition to the slick very-skilled, and the bangin' DJ mix to suplement it, I think this VJ's strength comes from content. Clearly he has just got a massive library of content that he has broken up into very digestable bit-size pieces. Except for maybe the soul-train segment these are all real quick blurbs of video just edited relentlessly together with the music. Fucking Kudos to the crew involved!
This kinda just impresses on me the importance of sampling intergrating even deeper and deeper into our lives. We're doing an OK job at the sweet currently, that is getting pretty OK samples at a pretty sluggish rate. I'm not sure what needs to happen to tip the scale the other way but maybe rolling constantly with a field recorder for audio and a handheld cam for video is a good place to start.
Also for those who don't know, my room is set up to grab:
Vinyl
CDs
VHS *(audio)*
Web/Youtube (audio and video)
DVD (audio/video, but the video ripping is cumbersome)
lovies!
yo!
Also for those who don't know, my room is set up to grab:
Vinyl
CDs
VHS *(audio)*
Web/Youtube (audio and video)
DVD (audio/video, but the video ripping is cumbersome)
copy and paste that shit into your skillset, homie! or aktchally your equipment section would be more appropriate. maybe just leave them as headers for now, but eventually hopefully they'll each have their own page of documentation (or at least a signal chain) of how those different ripping solutions work.
I envision a wiki page for, say, sampling vinyl, and everyone who has that in their skillset should document their method on that page. that way the vinyl sampling research is consolidated
basically what we're working towards here is being able to fluidly sample any media at a reasonably high quality for future use. we want a solution that is simple, consistent and elegant and can be invoked like quicksilver (and probably will happen thru qs, but i'm not saying that's a prereq or anything).
what I watched Jamie Wilkes (crazy 1337 h4xx0r @ the lab) do the other day was pretty much that. we were watching the "LEEEEROOOOOY JENKINS" video on youtube (http://youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU) totally worth watching the first 1:30 of build up to the punch line. Then he busted quicksilver to open a audio-hijack pro like app, record the audio, then quicksilver again to take the rip into an editor and trim the sample on either end, then save it in his local sample bank for later scratching on a Final Scratch or Ms. Pinky or something. So there's the workflow for how he samples, but also he tagged the video in del.icio.us for future reference. so within seconds of seeing it for the, jamie has it all cut up and ready to drop in a DJ set, plus he's got the original context indexed for future reference, so he never forgets where it came from (and simultaneously shares the original with his network via del.icio.us).
this is a good model, and basically I think our next step should be to gather all our sampling knowledge for each media on it's own wiki page (vinyl, casette, dvd, etc) by providing documentation (either our own or a link to some) of how we do it. Then we can compare methods or find the one best suited to our individual situations.
we just need to refine our sample science so that technical skill is no longer an obstacle and we can just focus on the art of it.
Amen to that. check the documents section of the MX Wiki.
Check the O.R. Ya LIke it So Far!?
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