Damian appears to be gloriously taking over my portfolio in a way that would put my other clients to shame – yes, shame on you! In December last year he asked me to produce the official music video for his single “Neverending”. As exciting as this may sound to some people, I found that once again I had taken on more than I could handle, with close to no experience in the field.

So once again Marko Perendija came to the rescue and got the project rolling by calling up his friend Vanessa Whyte, a young and talented DoP. She popped round the next day and by the end of the evening we had an idea that we sent off to Damian. From that point on things moved very quickly, and a crew of very clever people suddenly took shape.

Vanessa took on the role of directing the video, and did an impressive job at carrying the project from start to finish. I enjoyed playing around with some effects towards the last stages of the project, whilst Marko churned away at grading over 300 different cuts.

The past 10 days have been a much welcomed change of scenery for me. As I write now I’m sitting on Damian’s sofa, looking out from Echo Park onto the valley and hills of Hollywood. I arrived here primarily to film the next REBELRAVE episode, dedicated to the Droog boys and their new label, Culprit, but also to “vj” for Damian’s first show of his world tour. Read my previous post to know more about how I’m involved in this.

My time here has been full of stories to write about, and I’ve kept my close friends and family posted with essay-length extracts (according to Anna) of my daily happenings: the days spent in Damian’s studio rehearsing, flying to Texas for SXSW, staying at the “Bunker” (Droog’s villa in Hollywood), gawping at the views from the rooftop of the Standard Hotel in Downtown LA (check the mind-blowing photos from the party here), laying on the beach in Santa Monica, thrift shopping in Melrose Avenue, and tomorrow flying to Miami for the third and final leg of this trip. But I’ll delve no further than this list, and in fact I’ll keep this blog post short and sweet, and hope you enjoy the video: Damian Lazarus live at La Zona Rosa, SXSW, 18th March 2009.

The visuals were made by myself with an enormous helping hand from my friend Marko Perendja, who spent many sleepless nights and days at my side as we filmed and edited all of the content. Without him this project wouldn’t have turned out the way it has.

As Pete Tong says on Beatportal:
“By the end of the set everyone in the room was mesmerised, not only by the mad K-hole visuals but also by this unique and engaging character who looked uncannily like Fagin in Oliver Twist, mumbling, sometimes screaming into the mic (on an awkward 6” stand) over dubby dark and minimal techno beats. It rocked. Full marks for having the balls to do something original.”

Damian Lazarus’ debut album “Smoke the Monster Out” is coming out in a couple of months. Before I go on, I really should mention that there’s a reason why I never thought of becoming a music journalist. The reason is that my English vocabulary is limited and I find it extremely hard to put words to emotions. When, in cases like these, I need to describe something, I resort to this fairly simple calculation to find the right words (in programming the following are called Arrays):

Positive_feeling_words = ["nice", "beautiful", "amazing", "mmm"]
Negative_feeling_words = ["awful", "ouch","yuck","hmm"]

Simple as that.

So when I say that Smoke the Monster Out is a beautiful album, you should understand that it may well be a lot of other “positive” things too. Another important thing about it is that it’s not techno, which came as a surprise when first listening to it. But on second thought I realized that it made perfect sense for this to come from Damian, and that in fact the album’s tone matched his love for the weird and wonderful (but mostly the weird) in his dj sets, podcasts and the Get Lost compilation, be it techno, psychedelic, “ballady” or experimental.

If my skills at album-reviewing are urging you to scratch your eyeballs out, go read what a proper journalist has to say about it, here and here. Or even here.

Anyway, as this is not a music blog, and I clearly should leave the reviewing to the Reviewers, let’s move things forward: to promote this release, Damian will be performing at some of the biggest clubs around the world over the next few months, starting in a couple of weeks where he will be playing at SXSW in Austin, Texas.

The long and short of this post is that I’ve been producing the visuals for his show, which will also see me VJing alongside him. I’ll have to go into more detail about this at some other time, as right now I’m racing against time to get the content ready before I go to L.A. next Saturday.

So while you anxiously wait for me to write my next post about this, you can rest your eyes on Laz Wabit, who will be one of the creatures entertaining thousands of clubbers around the globe.

Six months ago I started this blog as an excuse to kill 10 hours’ waiting time at Stansted airport: I had just missed my flight to Barcelona where I was meant to spend the day with Dinky shooting a story about her for a future RebelRave episode. My next flight left us no time to film any interviews during the day, in fact as I landed in Barcelona I was driven to the hotel, then to the restaurant, then to the club, all within the space of an hour.

I felt relieved that Dinky didn’t throw anything at me when she saw me, as she had been up from the crack of dawn to fly in from Berlin. As a matter of fact she was rather forgiving and managed to make me feel better about the whole situation – she’s very nice, you must know.

Liquid is a fantastic club, I would love to go there again and would recommend it to anyone. It’s on the bottom edge of a hill on the west side of Barcelona, with a large outdoor swimming pool. Swimming pools and clubs usually don’t go well together from what I can gather, having witnessed the nauseating happenings at the Aquarium (Old Street, London), but the setting at Liquid was a small tropical paradise in comparison, and I often fought off the urge to jump in. Dancing awkwardly with camera in hand to the sounds of my favourite DJs on the side of a pool surrounded by palm trees and a starry sky is something I often look back on, especially when, like now, I happen to be staring out from my studio window onto a dark, gloomy and wet East London street.

Gosh, as usual there’s a lot to tell and I’d probably end up writing pages of all the endevours to produce this episode, so I’ll stop right here and move right onto mentioning the people who helped:
-Anna did a fine job at presenting the show for a second time.
-Her parts were filmed by my brother Adam on his big camera. Apart from its size I know nothing about it: it’s got big lenses, big tapes, a big bag. It’s also very heavy. It was really good to get his expert help on this, you’ll most probably notice the difference in filming quality!
-The photos taken at Stink are by Rob Low, who also does the press photos for Damian and other DJs on the label.

The next episode will be an exciting one, for which I shall be spending a couple of weeks in LA with Damian following part of the tour promoting his debut album. I’m also very excited to announce that I shall be producing the visuals for this tour, which will see him playing live at the best clubs around the world.

A couple of months ago I wrote something about scary visuals, and posted a bizarre video of myself wrapped in clingfilm. The long and short of it was this: Smokin Jo had asked me to produce some visuals for her latest (and very exciting) live performance project, TRNSSTR.

And so the story goes on…

With the invaluable help and experience of James Mountford, we organized a shoot with Angie (thank you Angie and Bookings Models!) which was filmed in slow motion on a Sony EX1. Just after a couple of weeks of preparation we were all ready for the first gig, to be performed at Redlight!

It was the first time I had mixed visuals in public like this (and it was only a month before that I had started practicing), so to say that I was nervous whilst sipping green tea backstage doesn’t really paint the picture very well – but the green tea bit is accurate. Even though this was not a massive venue, and small visual mistakes would probably go unnoticed, I just couldn’t control my heart trying to jump down into my stomach. Luckily for me it didn’t, and before I knew it I was on the stage, in my booth, with my laptop and his friends all ready to go.

I really would have loved to be in the crowd to enjoy the whole event. It went perfectly.

In this video James and I make a rare public appearance. James’ one is probably less fabulous than mine, but important nonetheless. So keep your eyes peeled for his skinny legs and my really nice t-shirt.

I need to make an edit of the visuals by themselves, so I hope to be posting that up here some day soon.

For more info on TRNSSTR visit smokinjo.com/trnsstr.

Shortly after editing REBELRAVE #2 back in February 2008 I was struck yet again by my usual and almost predictable luck: the external hard-drive I saved it on suddenly stopped responding (not to be confused with the time when my laptop died some time after), and I was left with nothing but a low-quality version I had uploaded for the Crosstown Rebels to preview. So we had no choice but to use that for the Rebel newsletter (rebelrave.tv didn’t exist at the time). And when rebelrave.tv went live I simply skipped this episode, to the confusion of many visitors.

However today, after 11 months, I came across a folder on another drive which I had simpy forgotten about. It contained a good quality export of the video. Not perfect, but good enough to go up on .tv!

My friend and housemate Robbie is featured in the intro. Illustrations are by Martin Wollerstam.
This episode sees Damian Lazarus playing at Goa in Madrid. There I met Anja Schneider, Shinedoe, Pan-Pot, and Exercise One.

Smokin Jo and her new project, TRNSSTR, are going to be performing live over the next few months, starting towards the end of December. So she asked me if I fancied doing some visuals for the event, and I immediately said yes.

I’ve been doing the odd bits of visuals for small parties here and there, using a mixture of “static” animations and physics-based graphics (all in Flash). But for this event I really wanted to use some real footage, especially as I have access to an EX1 camera through my brothers’ production company, which is a lot nicer than the camera I usually use (FX1). It has a variable framerate that can capture between 1 and 60 fps, which means that you can do some nice slow-motion stuff, and it also gives you the option of changing the lens, which gives the footage a real filmic look, losing a lot of digital traces..

So the other day, on my 1-hour break from a Flash project for Orange, I wrapped myself in clingfilm and set-up the camera (maybe it wasn’t in that order), with the help of brother #1.

We agreed that the clingfilm wasn’t right, and that if shown to a crowd of [temporarily] mentally and emotionally fragile people, would have been the perfect way to empty the venue – as well as crushing the poor souls of those who happened to be there.

However the lighting and the feel is just perfect for what I imagined, so based on this idea we’re going to shoot it again next week, with the help of my friend James who knows a bit more about lighting and styling than I do. I’ll be behind the camera this time. And Jo’s hidden the clingfilm.

REBELRAVE is always wrapped in drama, and this episode has been no exception. This was meant to be released a couple of months ago (or maybe more), but my computer’s hard-drive suddenly died just a few days away from the video being released. The files for this episode had disappeared, but miraculously made it back without a scratch, thanks to the help of a bunch of crazy technicians with white frizzly hair who live in a tiny basement of Spitalfields. You can read more about this story here

This episode of REBELRAVE has a slightly more developed format than the other episodes. We have been wanting to upgrade the format into something more cultural and a bit more appealing to people who aren’t necessarily techno-heads.

One of the additions to the format is that we now have a presenter, who also happens to be my girlfriend (what are the chances?), Anna Bosworth. Having a presenter gives the video a new dimension, and gives me a lot more to play with both when filming and when editing. There is now a story.

Another new element is that we don’t just focus on the club experience. From this episode you will see an interview with Seth, and a quick chat with the illustrator behind the Crosstown Rebel record sleeve designs.

To celebrate the new format I have launched REBELRAVE.TV, which will be the portal for all our films.

Hope you enjoy.

Well, now that REBELRAVE is taking its first steps into adolescence with its very own hot presenter (Anna Bosworth) and new format, I’ve decided it’s a good time to start saving clips that I can’t use in the final product.

It’s my second day on the edit of episode 5, which is the one that features Seth Troxler in Paris, and I’ve just come across a really funny scene that I can’t just throw away. We went to meet Seth at Sety’s top-floor apartment in the heart of Paris to film his interview. He was really intrigued by my name and kept saying it in full because he liked the sound of it, so here’s one of those times: