Marko Perendija, who is becoming more and more involved in the hardcore work force that is the Laz Machine, put together this little promo for Damian. The dodgy camera work is my own, and while Marko did a great job of putting the issue to me as politely as possible, he just got on with a nice piece of editing.

We just dug up a few episodes of REBELRAVE and used some footage from the visuals we made for Damian, which is the first time we’ve shown any of it online. Quite happy to see LazWabit in there too!

The track is called “Lullabies” and is taken from Damian’s album “Smoke The Monster Out”

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.

Once again I’m sitting around waiting for a video render to finish: I’m working on the second part of Damian Lazarus’ visuals, which will be played in full for the first time this thursday in Stockholm. I consider this to be the second beginning of his world tour, as so far he has only been performing half of his set.

Anyway, I’ve been staring at the render progress bar for far too long, so I decided to upload a little Flash toy I made to be used in Damian’s visuals, the “Random Shape Generator”.

…it does exactly that! open it up

A Pret A Manger has opened directly beneath the studio, securing yet another brutal mark in the heart of Shoreditch. I feel ashamed to say that I love their coffees, and religiously buy one each morning before walking up through their staff back door into my office’s corridor; however the other night as I left work to head home I saw some perfectly hydrated youths urinating on Pret’s glass front door, and I couldn’t help but smile.

Leaving work late at night happens quite often, so I get to see a few interesting scenes on the street. For example I get to witness the progression of the “girl’s night out”: the night begins with the wonky-walking stilettos in heavy makeup, then gracefully moves on to wonky-walking with stilettos in hand, ending with sitting on the pavement, makeup splattered all over the face yelling obscenities at no-one in particular (or down the phone). The “boy’s night out” isn’t as glamorous and nowhere near as captivating.

Anyway, this track was inspired by such Shoreditch happenings, while the Pret A Manger logo glared at me from the reflections in the windows on the other side of the road. Ah, Shoreditch.

During my incredibly busy times working on video-based projects for Damian Lazarus I managed to squeeze in a nice little web project for Skin, who I’ve got to know through Smokin Jo. While talks of a website for her Format 3 project are still being made, Skin also asked me to build a brand new website for the return of Skunk Anansie.

I remember telling a few people in LA about this fairly big news piece, but to my surprise they had never heard of the band. Is that just an LA thing? I found it quite intriguing.

Anyway, I don’t know how much I can say about what’s happening exactly with the band (apart from the fact that they’ll be playing at the Water Rats tonight and tomorrow), so I’ll just stick to explaining my side of things briefly: I brought in talented designer Casper Franken from Shotopop to art direct the whole project, and I’ll be taking care of the “creative development” (that is my job title, after all).

The holding page is up right now, and the full site should be live towards the beginning of May, so take a look: skunkanansie.net.

The photo above is by James Mountford.

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.”

Working with video means you get to spend a lot of time waiting for things to render. Depending on the project, I’d say that no more than 40% of my time is spent editing, and the other 60% of my time is spent waiting the elements to render.

I’ve missed making music a lot over the past few weeks, so about two days ago I started on a new track. Nothing complicated, just an average down-tempo riff with a beat. So tonight, as I worked on bringing the Laz Wabit to life (and rendering) I decided to just finish the track off and upload it here.

Every track has a history and always brings back vivid memories of the period when you made it. I know that this track will always remind me of this incredibly stressful period in preparation for the Smoke The Monster Out tour.

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.