For the past couple of years it has been my good fortune to have been in contact with Ali Demirel, the artist responsible for the mind bending visuals at Richie Hawtin’s gigs, as well as Contakt and the latest Plastikman show. He’d seen some of my REBELRAVE episodes and asked me to collaborate with MINUS on a couple of occasions, but I had to turn these down because I couldn’t fit them into my schedule, which was very frustrating for me as I had been a huge fan of all these guys and was flattered to have an opportunity to work with them!

Anyway at some point last year Ali asked me if I would be interested and free to spend New Year’s Eve with Richie Hawtin on a three-day European tour to produce the third instalment of MINUS EMBED, which is an interesting project run by Rich’s brother Matthew. When I read “private jet” in the email I just knew this was going to be a once in a lifetime opportunity, and immediately said YES!

I was to begin the trip from Berlin (where I was by that time already on holiday with friends) and on the 31st I would take a plane from Berlin to Messina (in Sicily), where I’d hook up with Richie & Co. for dinner. He would play at the club at midnight for a couple of hours, then we’d take a private jet to Riccione (north of Italy) where he’d play at Cocoricó at 6AM. Following that we would take a plane to Madrid at midday, spend the afternoon relaxing, and then head over to the club where he would play at midnight. The next morning at 7 we’d catch a plane back to Berlin and we’d end the tour that night at Weekend Club.

As huge as this was for me, I also received several heavy blows of bad luck, which transformed this trip into a nightmare of epic proportions. Things were going wrong right from the start when the camera rental place only gave me half of the kit, and from then on it was just one thing after another. But I’m going to skip the details and jump to the most crucial part, right at the half-way point of the tour when things went very bad indeed. It was 9AM, we were at Cocorico’ in Riccione, everything had been non-stop since my flight from Berlin the previous morning, and none of us had slept yet; Rich was just about to finish playing to a disturbingly wild crowd (see the photo above), we were all imprisoned in a tiny booth, which itself was full of organizers, promoters and all of their friends and family. It was CHAOS. Then came the moment to leave for the airport, and packing away the kit for the second time that night was a messy process of shuffling around on the alcohol-drenched floor in between people’s feet, often bumping into Nima who was also doing his best to pack Rich’s kit away. It turned out that I left the club without noticing that the camera charger wasn’t in my camera bag. Yes, the camera battery charger – gone. And my two batteries were almost dead. (Much later we came to the conclusion that it must have been taken by someone else by mistake)

By the time I realized this (photo above) I was in the private bus to the airport with half the Minus crew sleeping around me (apart from Ali and Nima who were trying to help me out), and there was no way to go back to the club as we didn’t have any spare time before catching the Madrid flight. I don’t think many people can truly imagine what was going on inside my head during those moments, coming face to face with such a monumental disaster at 9AM after being awake all night working. I was in a terrible state, and confronting Rich in the airport to give him the news was probably one of the worst moments I can remember ever having. I suggested that I should leave the crew to go on without me while I return to Berlin, but these people are an extremely nice bunch and they did all they could to cheer me up (in vain) and to find other ways to film the rest of the trip, so I pulled myself together and resolve the situation in any way I could.

Landing in Madrid at 12 AM on the first day of 2010 I immediately got in touch with a friend who lives there (thank you Ivan!), and then met up with him on the other side of the city (cost me €80 in taxi fares!) to pick up his tiny little stills camera that he lent me for the rather dismal occasion. I went back to the hotel, passed out in a heavy tormented sleep for a couple of hours (my first sleep time since leaving Berlin) and then headed over to the arena to film the Minus showcase (Richie Hawtin, Gaiser, JPLS, Ambivalent, Fabrizio Maurizi). This was the biggest show and crowd of the tour so far. So there I was, on stage with some of the world’s most idolised DJs, facing 5000 fans, filming with a little snap camera – awkward doesn’t even begin to describe the feeling well enough.

It has to be the highlight of the trip for me, which is a shame because there are many other moments that on the other hand were amazing: meeting Ali, traveling with the hilarious Nima, leaving a -10º Berlin which was covered in 1 foot of snow and landing in a 28º Sicily, spending the afternoon on the sea front eating clam spaghetti with one half of Booka Shade (who was also playing in Messina that night), meeting and dining with Richie and his parents and his brother Matthew, meeting Kevin (Ambivalent), taking a 6-seater jet to Riccione, meeting Jon Gaiser and Fabrizio Maurizi, bumping into Tiga (he was on our same flight to Madrid), then meeting Steve Bug on the flight back to Berlin (he was to play at Weekend with Richie that night), and then getting to enjoy the amazing party at Weekend, finally re-united with my best friend and my girlfriend, feeling like I had been away for years.

I wanted to deliver the final product to them before the end of the month, as I knew that from February onwards I was going to be busy on the RebelRave US tour. This was when I was moving to New York, so three days after arriving in my new hometown I got mugged (they hit me in the face with something that felt like a baseball bat) and I got sent to hospital with multiple fractures on the left side of my face. This is why this video filmed at NYE has just now been released at the end of August!

On the editing side I had a bit of a task at hand as I had to deal with different types of footage and merge it all into a single video. In Messina and Riccione I’d used a Sony EX3, in Madrid a little crappy stills camera, from the trip to Madrid to Berlin I used my little Harinezumi (an amazing little digital super8-emulator camera), and in Berlin I used Minus’ HD camera. So this explains why there are all these different looks and styles throughout the sections of the video.

Leaving Berlin, still disturbed by the experience in Riccione, I wanted to push my own boundaries to deliver something exceptional, however on the creative side of things this film didn’t quite come up to my expectations given the difficult circumstances. But I think I have managed to salvage a project that seemed doomed, and in that sense I’m very happy with the result, and feel I’ve really achieved something!

—

Update 5 September 2010
I’m getting lots of people asking me about the music used, so here is the tracklist:

00:20 – 01:15 False – Forgetting
03:06 – 03:55 Plastikman – Risk Assessment
03:55 – 05:15 Speedy J – Minimal (John Acquaviva – Olivier Giacomotto rmx)
05:45 – 05:55 False – Halflife
06:50 – 08:15 JPLS – Spooker
11:50 – 12:33 Bryan Zentz – Shadowtalk
12:33 – 13:50 The Selph – Designer Beaver (Uto Karem rmx)
13:55 – 15:00 JPLS – Fold
15:55 – 16:35 Gaiser – Backyard

The video is split across two different scenes, one where Rob is shown as a regular looking guy in the city, the other is in a parallel dimension where Rob is almost naked, his body writhing in sweat, contorting himself in a closed space filled with smoke. So from this second scene I shot around 50 clips, here is one of them that I just wanted to put up. To film this I was hanging halfway over a banister which had a bike chained to it that I had to lean on, so please excuse the shaky camera!

I just stuck my own music in there to keep things simple and to give it a mood.

I must say Rob has turned out to be the rawest embodiment of what my vision has been for many projects. I love seeing the human body as an animal, as a machine and as a mass of meat, muscles and sweat, and so far I’ve always dreamed of making something about this. So having Rob turn up for Zev’s music video has been a true blessing for me.

Probably for this video you won’t be seeing much footage like the one above as it doesn’t really belong to Zev’s music, however I would love to work again with Rob and his partners to create something a bit on the dark side for future projects.

To promote the album and the following tour, Will had the idea of developing an ongoing series of beautiful and abstract imagery, all viewable on a single portal, that could represent the various aspects of the album.

So over the past few months Will has developed a single look for all the videos, following a very specific technique that processes regular-looking footage into breathtaking art, giving everything a vintage feel that is reminiscent of film experiments from the 1920s. But he takes this all a step further by morphing and time-stretching the footage using some pretty modern-day technology, generating some of the starkest imagery that most people will find difficult to categorize.

So for the launch of the campaign Will got me involved in making the trailer, a teaser of what is to come over the next few weeks. We spent the whole weekend in his office in Dumbo filming a whole bunch of different things, which I then edited and passed onto him for him to pass it through his mysterious box of magic tricks. Oh, before the edit I actually started off by mixing Matthew’s tracks into a single score.

In the last few scenes you can see my eye, which we filmed while projecting my enemies animation using a macro lens on a Canon 5D mkII.

Keep an eye out on Matthew Dear’s website over the next few weeks for more beautiful work by Will: www.matthewdear.com

Links:
-Matthew Dear
-Will Calcutt portfolio
-Will Calcutt on Ghostly Int

I thought it would be nice to include the various characters who live at The Marcy Hotel in the video, without making them too prominent, so you can see Gadi (Lamb), Greg and Nick (both from No Regular Play) re-arrange the lettering on the back wall, as well as some other little editing tricks that are just meant to come up and tickle the Youtube viewer who is just there listening to the music.
The second one contains a bit more trippy elements that you may or may not notice.

Below is the first version, you can watch the second here

Other news
Lydia K in Vice film-art competition
“Lydia K” has been entered into a film-art competition run by Vice and VBS.tv, and is now part of the top 10 finalists. There’s a screening this Wednesday 7th of July at the Old Blue Last in London, and in September the winner will be announced. Apparently the public vote will help the judges narrow down the selection for the winner, so you can head over to the event on Facebook and click on “Like” where “Lydia K” is linked. You need to rsvp to be able to activate the Like button – you can just RSVP “not attending”. I hate these public voting things, but I’d appreciate your contribution!

M-NUS EMBED
My project for M-NUS is finished and has been sent off to the label, so should be up any day now!

One of the most special moments from that party was something I never used in the final episode of REBELRAVE #8. So under REBELRAVE’s UNCUT label (which is about showing special unused footage from my episodes) I decided to release this little gem: Lee Curtiss is hosting a Blind Date between Wolf + Lamb (Zev Eisenberg + Gadi Mizrahi) and Le Loup (Leonard Perret). The Marcy Hotel boys had just released a track by Le Loup, however this was to be their first encounter with the young Frenchman, so we decided to make a fuss over it.

I’d like to change REBELRAVE.TV by adding an UNCUT section, but until then you can check out other UNCUT videos from a somewhat abandoned YouTube channel that I made about a year ago:
-Damian Lazarus + Seth Troxler at Get Lost, Electric Pickle, Miami, 2009 (WMC)
-Jamie Jones at Get Lost, Electric Pickle, Miami, 2009 (WMC)

I’ve also jumped on the Facebook fan-page bandwagon just like the rest of the world. Become a Fan, Like, Follow or whatever you want to do with REBELRAVE’s page, and also with my own one which I creatively named DAVID TERRANOVA.

The one thing I loved about this episode was the footage that Damian and Jamie sent me, filmed on their little digital cameras. I couldn’t go on all of their dates of the REBELRAVE Tour so I asked them to do some filming, hoping that it be usable in the episode. It turns out that it’s the most exciting footage to watch, mainly because it gives a real insight into their worlds, which is what their fans and friends love the best.
Also their footage was just perfect for being twisted and warped out of shape, playing around with the audio, and just making it become rather “dreamy” (my mum reads this).

It’s been a huge project to work on, as the film needed to feature footage filmed over two months, the last date being in Miami. But before I even flew to Miami I had already half of the video ready with the footage from New York, LA and San Francisco. So the edit has been a bit of a journey, when I began in February and ended last week, and that’s why it feels very choppy, but probably that’s a good thing.

There are some really quick shots of clouds, a fetus, a white rabbit… Those were part of the visuals that I made for the tour: I made a 25 minute edit that Damian could take on a DVD to the various clubs around North America to be projected during the parties. At Avalon in LA I actually VJ’d, mixing these visuals live using VDMX, which is why I got someone else to film the party.

So while I’m currently juggling 4 video projects (including work for Richie Hawtin, REBELRAVE, and Ghostly International) I decided to take the day off today to spend it working with James Mountford to make this, which we filmed a few weeks ago in New York when he came to pay a visit.

James had popped over to New York for a fashion shoot, and while he spent a week there we thought it to be a good chance to shoot something together. So he made a few phone calls, and within the hour he managed to secure the help of makeup artist Tamah K and model Irina Vodolazova.

On the day of the shoot we went to my rooftop and rigged 3 small digital cameras together on a piece of wood, so while I filmed on my regular camcorder and James filmed on a Canon 5D, we took it in turns to also film with this triple camera setup, which produced a whole bunch of footage of Irina filmed from slightly different angles that can be synced together with interesting results!

But this has also meant that it’s a pretty complex edit, so while time has been ticking away, and while I found myself a mile away from James’ place today, we thought of editing this secondary footage that we shot in the elevator, which is a lot simpler: it shows a fairly aggressive-looking Irina in a grungy elevator breathing heavily in distress.

Just a note on the video: more than anything else I see it as a humorous take on the typical Fashion Video that seems to be the craze these days.

Part II will be coming soon!

…and blogged it.

Here’s some photos I took at the time.

On a separate note, I’m trying to slowly merge all my work that I post on this blog into a more practical page, so for now I’ve set up a Vimeo Channel where you can subscribe.

This was a week ago. A day after being discharged I was already on Skype with Mr Lazarus discussing (under the effects of some hardcore morphine) RebelRave’s next big step: The REBELRAVE U.S. Tour.

Here’s a small promo I made for it, for more info go to rebelrave.tv/us-tour-2010

This tour is going to be special: 26 dates across the country with Damian Lazarus, Jamie Jones, Seth Troxler and Deniz Kurtel. I’ll be filming parts of the tour which will be featured in REBELRAVE #9, and also I’ll be producing the visuals, which actually I need to get onto right now as there are only 2 weeks left until the first date at Pacha New York.

The U.S. tour will then carry on in Europe in April for a second phase, which again I’ll be filming for episode #10!