Film

Doug Shipton mix and Hocus Focus night

There’s a new mix available by Doug Shipton from the Finder’s Keepers collective that was recorded for the Cinefamily gig in LA recently (or it may be a recreation of his set). It’s a half hour mix of spacey New Age electronics, the new love of the digging set it seems. Great poster here too, featuring Suzanne Ciani with a head full of wires, presumably by the man Votel, he really should do a book of his work some day.
And here’s another for an event coming up, a Hocus Focus night featuring Andy’s missus, Jane Weaver, re-scoring ‘Belladonna of Sadness’ live as well as a screening of ‘Vali The Witch of Positano’ (no, me neither). Love what these guys are doing, wish they would do more down South but then we’re pretty spoilt anyway.

Posted in Design, Event, Film, Poster / flyer. | No Comments |

‘O Is For Orange’ AV mix for Solid Steel 25


This week I decided to put down some of the set I made for ‘A Few Old Tunes’, the Boards of Canada-inspired night we did on June 20th. Because I’d edited so much video to go with it, I thought I’d finally get round to my first solo video mix too, so here it is.

(UPDATE: Vimeo closed the Solid Steel account that hosted this mix after three copyright strikes so it’s currently offline but some kind soul has uploaded it to their own ‘Solid Steel’ account here but I can’t embed it here)

‘O Is For Orange’ is the sound of weathered tape saturation, detuned analogue synthesisers, vinyl crackle and machine hum. It’s also the look of unfocused, flickering lenses, mirror image filters and blurry grain embedded into film. Unofficial fan films sit alongside experimental animation, public information shorts and even the odd official video. Material that BoC took inspiration from blends with their own work as well as many that they inspired.

I make no apologies for the quality of the vision here, some of it is only available via the web at frustratingly small sizes. In a couple of instances I’ve actually downgraded the look and quality of the image to make it blend in better and in others, even my best attempts at filtering can’t disguise the low quality of the source material. No HD or widescreen here, I’ve gone back to 4:3 for this one even though some of the clips were originally 16:9 or wider.

On the Vimeo page I’ve endeavored to list as many of the videos and their respective directors as possible alongside the track list. When we’ve done video mixes in the past we’ve repeatedly found that some film makers take exception to having their work used like this, whereas few artists would email you requesting that you take their track out of a mix. I can see why, especially if a promo they’re done for one group ends up being re-edited and bolted on to a completely different track.

Anyway, enough guff, thanks to everyone who inspired this mix, especially Boards of Canada, and everyone who requested that we recorded our sets for ‘A Few Old Tunes’ last week. Josh from Posthuman‘s is already up in audio form (here) and I’m reliably told that Tom Central has his waiting in the wings for next week.

Posted in DJ Food, Film, Mixes/Solid Steel, Solid Steel. | 18 Comments |

Edit* – 2nd version of ‘Semena Mertvykh’ video

http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/BOC-Semena-Mertvykh-2-web.mov
I decided that the imagery in the Boards of Canada video I made for ‘Semena Mertvykh’, in the post before, was all wrong. Whilst both being excellent clips, the tone was over-bleak with too much grey and black and there wasn’t any warmth in the film. This track has really captured me from the new ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ album – it’s dark and bleak but there’s warmth, hope and beauty there too, an incredibly hard thing to pull off. I thought it deserved a different approach and decided to make a new edit using the opening scenes from Richard Stanley‘s 1990 film, ‘Hardware’.

Posted in Film. | 3 Comments |

A Few Old Tunes – this Thurs at Catch, London

http://www.djfood.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Semena-Mertvykh-web.mov

This Thursday is a special one-off night that Josh from Posthuman and I came up with called ‘A Few Old Tunes’. This is a Boards of Canada-inspired night of music and visuals that we’ll be doing alongside Tom Central and Mach V at Catch on Kingsland Road. It’s free and we’ll be playing BOC and various things that either inspired them or that they inspired from 8pm until 2am.

The video above is something I edited up this morning using footage from Mischa Rozema‘s ‘OFFF Barcelona 2011 Main Titles’ and a film called ‘Forgotten Places’ by Zac Boyet, both sourced from Vimeo, over the final track from ‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’, ‘Semena Mertvykh’.


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BOC-themed ‘A Few Old Tunes’ night in London

To celebrate the release of the new Boards of Canada album and – purely because Josh from Posthuman and I would really love a space to play their kind of music all night long – we bring you ‘A Few Old Tunes’. We’ll be joined on the decks by Tom Central from Keep Up! and Mark Van der Vord on visuals.

The premise is simple: occupy the upstairs room of Catch on June 20th for a night of music and film by or inspired by Boards of Canada. Don’t worry, it won’t be back to back BOC, we want this to be more than a 1 band love-in. Expect plenty of Ghost Box, electronica and hauntological material with a fine set of suitably degraded visuals to go with it.

Posted in DJ Food, Film, Gigs. | No Comments |

Super Satanic Saturdays

It’s difficult enough to get a handle on the various activities and schemes of Psychedelic Satanism that Jason Atomic has his hand in.

Just to say that this weekend sees the first of his Super Satanic Saturdays at the Resistance Gallery.

Go to the Satanic Mojo blog for more background info on the upcoming comic and exhibition based on his exploits. The video above gives you an idea of where he’s heading, sounds right up my street.

Posted in Art, Comics, Event, Film. | No Comments |

Bonobo ‘Cirrus’ zoetrope 12″

Finally, after a couple of teases by Ninja Tune, I can show this beauty off, something that’s been in the pipeline for a while now. Today is Bonobo‘s big gig at the Roundhouse, a full day of music curated by Simon Green and rounded off with a performance by him and his band. With the likes of Gilles Peterson, Machine Drum, The Invisible, Adam Buxton’s Bug, a Boiler Room-hosted space and Solid Steel broadcasting snippets of the event on the web, it should be epic. To make it even more epic 500 lucky golden ticket winners will each receive one of these 12″ zoetrope picture discs of his already classic track, ‘Cirrus’.

I took the original archive loops from Cyriak‘s incredible video for the track and broke them down into circular visuals to make a spinning animated version. Dating back to the first primitive animation techniques of our time, the zoetrope relies on a viewer to see the action happen. This is included with the disc along with assembly instructions so that people can watch while the disc plays. See the above film for an approximation of what the disc does when spinning.

This is all rounded off by a beautiful Leif Podhajsky design on the reverse side. Lovely.

Posted in Film, Ninja Tune, Openmind designs, Records. | 8 Comments |

Funki Porcini debuts ‘City’

Next weekend Funki Porcini debuts a project he’s been working on for years – it’s an interactive environment called ‘City’ and it will be installed as part of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival.
It runs from 18th-21st, opens from midday to 8pm and it’s free, there’s very little info about it but he’s assured me that it’s the best thing he’s ever done and there’s very little else like it.

There are a couple of short promos on his Vimeo page but it’s all very secretive, when pressed he won’t even give away details, saying that it has to be a surprise.

Posted in Event, Film. | No Comments |