RobKinetic // uncut

Over the weekend I shot the video for Zev‘s new release “Don’t break it”, which I’ll be editing over the next couple of weeks. For it I asked Rob Davidson to take the main (and only) role in the video: Rob runs a contemporary dance company here in New York called Kinetic Architecture and the stuff they do is very experimental. I’m far too ignorant about dance to be able to describe what they do, so instead please check out these videos on Youtube (contains nudity): Metochos, Over You, Pretty Air.

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.

20 July 2010 14:27
Experimental Video
body art dancer performance

Clockwork “B.O.A.T.S” Artwork

At some point last summer I saw something on Tumblr that made me want to experiment with merging two portraits into one. So I took Zahara into the bathroom (our only white wall at the time), we took a couple of portraits of each other (happened often in that bathroom), and then I put this together. It ended up on my facebook profile pic for a bit.

A few months go by and I get an email from one half of Clockwork, Federico Maccherone. I had met him when he used to live in New York and had stayed in touch since. He told me how he liked my latest facebook profile pic and that he wanted me to make something similar for his debut album “B.O.A.T.S (Based On A True Story)” with buddy Francesco Leali. I had just finished working on No Regular Play’s album cover and loved the process of working on a cool print job so I said yes!

Them being in Berlin and me in New York, I thought it’d be best to pull in my friend and brilliant photographer Julia Soler to take care of the photography; being in Spain she was just a 2 hour EasyJet away. She spent an afternoon with them taking a variety of portraits at their home in Berlin, and sent me the files the next day. For the following couple of weeks I worked on various designs, all revolving around the initial grid idea, and we finally picked two variations of the artwork: one for the front, and one for the inside.

This grid system of overlaying two faces is pretty interesting. Depending on where the grid is positioned, the new merged face can look more like one person and less than the other. There’s a fine line where you can get the merged face actually look halfway between the two. Move the grid over by a couple of pixels and the whole thing changes completely. Try it!

The album itself is really great, recommended listening for the after hours or evening chilling at home times. It’s out on Life & Death, grabbable on beatport, although I’d be a lot happier if you bought the actual CD.

Check out more photos of the CD here, they were taken by Tomaso Lisca. Grazie!

IN OTHER NEWS
I was interviewed by Public Description
I worked with Timothy Saccenti making the visuals for Depeche Mode (here’s a preview one of them)
I spent a couple of weeks at Vice working on stuff
I’m currently working at Redbull Music Academy on other stuff
I’m also working on some photos for Bob Moses
Damian Lazarus mentions my name in here in relation to my music for the first time
I have some new sounds on my soundcloud

Credits
Photography: Julia Soler
Design: David Terranova
Photos of the CD: Tomaso Lisca

6 May 2013 00:28
Design
Clockwork design Italy Julia Soler Life and Death photography

A decade of Crosstown Rebels

10 years of the mighty Crosstown! To celebrate, Damian is taking the roster on a world tour this year. Owning a collection of era defining music, as well as a whole bunch of REBELRAVE episodes that have documented the label’s antics for part of its lifespan, the idea for this promo was to grab all of the best elements and squeeze them into a few minutes of video. It was a bit of a challenge, specially with the variety of video qualities and looks.

I wish I had more time to play around with the audio, it’s not quite as tripped out as I wanted it to be. During the Get Lost V scene you can hear some of Acid Pauli’s remix of Oregano (watch Gonzales playing the original), which is one of my favourite tunes of the mix. The “leaf leaf leaf leaf, and leeeeaves” part is taken from the 3rd bonus mix, an amazing 2 hour mix which comes as a download only for those who buy the actual CD! Crosstown connoisseurs will hear a few other short references to some of the most iconic tracks.

I also wanted to have a bit more time to work on the overall look, so unfortunately it feels a little unfinished to me. But the important thing is it makes you want to party, right?

I also made the tour flyer.

Update: for the “track ID” crew, here’s the track list.
0:00 Minilogue – Hitchhiker’s choice
0:10 Andre Kraml – Safari
0:20 Hiem – She’s the one
0:34 Pier Bucci – Hay Consuelo
0:46 Und – Cocopuffs
0:49 Metrika – Mayas (taken from the Day Zero album)
0:54 Minilogue – Hitchhiker’s choice
0:58 Infinity Ink – Infinity
1:05 Jamie Jones – 911 / Und – Cocopuffs
1:11 Andre Kraml – Safari
1:27 Andre Kraml – Safari (James Holden Remix)
1:35 [terranova meltdown]
1:41 Minilogue – Hitchhiker’s choice
1:45 Fur Coat – You and I
1:49 [terranova meltdown]
1:55 Acid Pauli – Get Lost V (Bonus Mix) + Acid Pauli – Oregano
2:03 Francesca Lombardo – Sofiel
2:11 Deniz Kurtel – The L Word
2:15 Art Department – Without you
2:26 Tiga – The Picture
2:29 Jamie Jones – Summertime
2:41 Maceo Plex – Can’t leave you
2:59 Amirali – Beautiful World

24 January 2013 12:09
Promo REBELRAVE Video
amirali anniversary art department crosstown rebels damian lazarus Deniz Kurtel jamie jones maceo plex pier bucci promo REBELRAVE seth troxler tour

Nicolas Jaar visuals

Since shooting the Influences episode I’ve been in touch with Nicolas Jaar about working together a bit more. I was supposed to make some visuals for his September tour, but it just didn’t work out in the end because our schedules couldn’t match up. So finally a few days ago we finally managed to book in my time for his show at Art Basel in Miami.

We spent a couple of hours together on Monday, he played me his new set and we agreed on a certain direction that the visuals should take. So I went home and spent the following 5 days working around the clock (with a 5-hour sleep break on the Wednesday), rendering a whole bunch of abstract visuals. There wasn’t much time at all to prepare, and the direction I had chosen was probably the most processor-heavy to render: layers of liquid, overlaying stock footage, and a whole bunch of effects; rendering 10 seconds would take 10 minutes. My friend Max Stockman came along to help me out by bringing a couple of extra laptops, and in between his classes at NYU he just sat by my side throughout the whole process, making all sorts of wonderful imagery. We were rendering right up until 9AM on Friday, at which point I jumped in a cab to the airport, boarded the plane, slept a little, landed in Miami, went to the apartment, and within an hour I was at the venue for soundcheck, somehow still standing.

The show went perfectly and I was really pleased the way everything turned out after such an intense week, and hanging with all my friends that night was the best reward. I finally got to sleep the following day when I got back home and passed out in my bed for about 15 hours straight.

The actual visuals are pretty abstract, the idea I like is that most of the time you’re just looking at some sort of oil paintings that are moving in extreme slow motion. Every so often a recognizable figure begins to form and kind of takes you by surprise, and before you know it it’s gone again.
Various parameters of the visuals were reacting to the sound, which gave this motionless imagery a bit of a kick, pulsating to the bass. By the way I use VDMX to control all of this.

“the depictions left you in a haze, unable to let your stare linger too long before you felt like someone put acid in your drink” – Music Obsessed

Hopefully I’ll be writing more on this topic very soon!

13 December 2012 02:38
Live Visuals Video
2012 Art Basel miami Nicolas Jaar vdmx visuals

The way you fake it

A new tune I’ve been working on sporadically for the past few months. Tina Turner did the vocals for me, I cut out most of her screeching, hopefully she won’t notice.

30 September 2012 15:17
Music
slow house

No Regular Play: Endangered Species album cover

I’ve never done an album cover before and I’m really happy that my first time happened to be for No Regular Play, as I’ve always really loved their music. Nick and Greg had done a great job at putting together these headpieces, and so there wasn’t much other work to do apart from setting up a light and clicking the button and doing some knob-twiddling in photoshop.

The album comes on November 23rd, so grab it cause it’s hot!

30 September 2012 14:59
Design
album cover endangered species greg paulus nick debruyn no regular play photography

Day Zero – Teaser

What a lineup! Quite appropriate for the end of the world.

I popped this little one out amongst the various happenings that are going on right now.
Ana Rifa designed the amazing artwork for the event, and she handed some elements over to me to put this teaser promo together in After Effects.

Check out this interview with Damian which will give a little insight as to what this is all about.

The track used is taken from an upcoming album which is a compilation of different artists who each made a track in occasion of Day Zero. Hot stuff. This one is by Metrika.

Credits
Illustrations: Ana Rifa
Animation: David Terranova
Music: Metrika "Mayas"

22 September 2012 19:58
Promo Video
crosstown rebels damian lazarus Day Zero massive attack mexico party playa del carmen

Sisma

I’ve had some volcano footage that I downloaded ages ago and have always wanted to do something with it. Finally got a chance last night, and found the perfect soundtrack by SURVIVE, who have an amazing LP released on MANNEQUIN.

It’s more of a passive video that you’re supposed to watch in the early hours of the morning when your senses are heightened. Nothing actually happens, but I like that.

I’ve got some stills on flickr, good for desktop wallpapers if you’re into that sort of thing:

Press & Screenings
Mystic Groove

17 September 2012 22:14
Experimental Video
abstract experimental mannequin sisma smoke survive volcano

Music: Born Into This

It’s my first day in Spain of the summer, the plane I flew on had no tv screens, and by the time I got bored of complaining to my girlfriend I decided to rummage around on the laptop for things to do on a 25% battery life. I found this track that I completely forgot about, which I started a few weeks ago.

16 July 2012 21:02
Music
electronica moody Music

Bloc Influences: Apparat

Final episode of Bloc’s Influences series!

Spike Morris went over to Berlin to meet up with Sascha Ring aka Apparat, who had chosen to speak about the punk/acid-techno movement which was happening around his parts back in the day… Here’s an email from him during our prep talks which can explain more

“The influences videos are pretty cool so far. i’m actually a bit afraid i wouldnt have anything that special to say:) i might be able to talk about post reunification east german russian bunker raves and how dirt and techno punk attitude influenced me.

Back in the days it was not so much about certain artists. a lot of these records were black or whitelabels. of course there were labels like bunker or acid planet from holland but basically it was more about the raw energy of the music rather than celebrating a certain person (dj). i think that was also what drew people into it. most of them were punks and somehow the musicwas compatible… i guess the main thing i kept from the old days is a certain love for imperfection and a dirty sound here and there.”

Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/44910440

Spike did a great job at filming and handling a last minute edit. The only problem we had was when we went to research photos and footage from the era that Sascha talks about, we couldn’t find anything online at all as it was a pretty underground movement. So, with no material to use as cutaways, I had to make do with some footage that I shot a long time ago at a club in London (a Hot Natured party), which I tried to make it look as industrial 90s as possible… So that’s the black and white scene is in the image above.

IN OTHER NEWS

BLOC 2012 FILM: Next weekend is the weekend Bloc have been building up to for the past 11 months, and quite rightly they want it to be documented. I won’t be able to go there myself because of passport troubles, but the FALKOHAUS engine is working in full force, with a 4 man camera unit. Part of the crew is formed by a group of young Italian film makers called Flash Factory who I’ve been looking at for several months now. They have a great approach to making these sorts of videos so I wanted to bring that into the project. Also filming is Jocie Cox, who has worked with me over the past 2 or 3 years. Believe it or not we still haven’t met in person!

REBELRAVE 12: It’s being released any day now.

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
Filmed and Edited by Spike Morris

More blog posts about this
More episodes from the series here

29 June 2012 09:41
Documentary Video
apparat berlin bloc bloc 2012 bloc influences documentary interview spike morris

Bloc Influences: Nicolas Jaar

The third episode of the Bloc Influences series featured Nico Jaar, who I spent an evening with at his parents’ place in Manhattan.

Nico’s been around the Wolf + Lamb scene here in NYC, but we’d never been officially introduced, so it was good to finally chat face to face without having to lip-read over loud music. As with all the other episodes of the Influences series, we had a few phone calls beforehand to chat about his chosen topic: Keith Jarrett and the art of improvising.

Unfortunately we couldn’t make it out to his studio in Providence where he has all his equipment, so Bojana Mozina kindly offered us her apartment and piano, which as you can see came in pretty handy. After shooting at her place we went back to his parents’ apartment and finished off the interview there. I had the privilege of working with documentary filmmaker Joshua Zeman who was in charge of steering the conversation with Nico, while Max Stockman and I handled the cameras.
Martina Rojas Chaigneau, the FALKO HAUS Production Manager who has worked with me from the beginning of the series, did a great job at helping me put the shoot together in a rather last minute search for a piano!

IN OTHER NEWS
-NIGHT HAWKS: NIGHT HAWKS is my video blog, which I occasionally tweak to improve its features. The latest upgrade is the addition of a Flash-based TV player that I built which plays all the videos back to back without interruption. I always use this at parties or at my house whenever we have friends round, nice visuals to run on a projector. Also I set up a dedicated Channel on Vimeo, so if you’re into that kind of thing subscribe here.

-DISCO VERY: Veronika from DISCO VERY wrote a pretty concise article about me that wraps me up in a few paragraphs. Nice to see someone actually reads this stuff, thank you!

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
Second Camera & Sound: Max Stockman
Producer: Joshua Zeman
Production Manager: Martina Rojas Chaigneau

More blog posts about this
View more "Influences" episodes here

18 June 2012 07:30
Documentary Video
bloc bloc 2012 bloc influences interview keith jarrett Nicolas Jaar

Bloc Influences: Steve Reich

In the run up to Bloc’s festival in London this July, they asked me to handle a short series of interviews with some of their lineup artists, to hear about who or what has played an important part in influencing their career. The first episode featured Gary Numan, and he spoke about how Ultravox and John Foxx had helped him figure out how to add synth sounds to his punk band, turning him into the Gary Numan that we all know him as.

To my delight, the second episode was to feature Steve Reich, filming at his house in upstate New York. My friend Yves Schaeffner who is a journalist working for Canal+ really helped me prepare the topics that were to be covered and came with us to run the interview with Steve himself. It’s a great experience to work with someone from that side of the media world who really knows about how to research and how to run a professional interview with someone on Reich’s scale.

After an hour’s drive out from Manhattan and into the New York countryside, we ended up at Steve’s house where he welcomed us in and let us set up the equipment in his living room. We had one hour to shoot everything and pack up again, so we were under a tiny bit of pressure. Unfortunately he didn’t have any instruments at his house, but he managed to maintain an upbeat monologue about his experiences. The moment when he described the breaths of the clarinet player was particularly magical.

Bryan Cosgrove as ever was a great help throughout the project, operating the second camera and afterwards working through all the footage and putting a storyline in place with a rough edit.

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
Second Camera and Assistant Editor: Bryan Cosgrove
Producer: Yves Schaeffner

Press & Screenings
Resident Advisor | FACT | The Quietus | DUMMY

More blog posts about this
View more "Influences" episodes here

28 May 2012 18:15
Documentary Video
bloc bloc 2012 bloc influences documentary ghana interview steve reich

Bloc 2012 lineup

New promo for Bloc! Stepping up the game, working with a proper VFX guy for my first time!

The “VFX guy” is Sina Taherkhani, who happens to be a friend of mine here in Brooklyn, he works for a big agency in the city as Art Director working on the big stuff. We got together a couple of times to sketch out some ideas, revolving around creating a submerged world, and after giving him my rather dry edit, he’s been on the case, enhancing every single shot with all sorts of hotness.

The track is Porc #1 by Moderat, which has always been a favourite of mine… Check out this other video I made back in the day when I went to do a job with Matthew Dear.

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
Filmed by Adam Docker
VFX by Sina Taherkhani

14 May 2012 09:58
Promo Video
3d bloc bloc 2012 festival lineup particles promo Sina Taherkhani vfx

The Hollow Men

I’ve played guitar for years, but since moving to New York I had to make do without one, until I finally bought one the other day. Since then I’m getting back into the moody long hypnotic sounds that I used to play a lot, so I tried dropping it in amongst some digital sounds to see what happened

10 May 2012 16:00
Music

Bloc: Stubnitz

The beginning of a small documentary series for Bloc festival, starting aboard a 50 year old fishing vessel called MS Stubnitz which has been turned into a travelling music and art space. Keep an eye out for future episodes, featuring a bunch of pretty high profile artists!

The first two tracks are by my friends Maesia and Orgon… Hotness from Rome!
Great camera work as always from Spike Morris

Credits
Direction & Edit: David Terranova
Director of Photography & Colourist: Spike Morris
Assistant Editor: Bryan Cosgrove
Production Manager: Martina Rojas Chaigneau

3 May 2012 14:58
Documentary Video
bloc bloc 2012 documentary ship Stubnitz

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs: Tapes & Money

I’m so honoured to get involved with Orlando’s ventures again (check the 4Play doco I made last year), this time promoting his Tapes & Money single which received a bunch of new vocals (though I really didn’t mind the original version). He wanted to transmit the energy of the live show, something that is hard when shooting a video in a studio. So the idea was to film at one of the shows to capture the real thing: pretty simple, and I think I’ve got the hang of these live event videos (REBELRAVE / Richie Hawtin / Matthew Dear).

I really enjoyed editing this as I’m particularly inspired by a lot of these acid/VHS style videos, and I wanted to try to make something similar using the live concert footage as I think it really matches TEED’s esthetic. This style is something you can’t really predict, you’re just overlaying images on top of each other and building compositions on the fly, and until you render it out you don’t really know how it’s going to turn out. As I was editing I was really impressed by some of the still frames which looked more like oil paintings than anything else, however you probably miss them when watching the video as it’s so fast-paced. So I saved some of the stills on my Flickr, check them out!

On the filming side I received the invaluable help from a great up and coming DP called Spike Morris, who I came to know through Vimeo and who I’ll be working more with in the near future. The venue was pretty big, and the crowds were heaving, so we couldn’t have made it without the help of a third camera, operated by Oscar Hudson, and a fourth camera operated by Polydor’s very own Sam Seager (check out his photo blog!)

After taking the footage back home, I only had 8 days to get it out. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to make it without the help of Bryan Cosgrove who worked alongside me during the edit.

Check out the Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs website for more magic

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
DP / 1st Camera: Spike Morris
2nd Camera: Oscar Hudson
Assistant Editor: Bryan Cosgrove
Hair & Makeup: Jacqui Mcelroy

Press & Screenings
Music Video of the Day | Modular Records | God is in the TV Zine

More blog posts about this
4Play doco
4Play doco / Trailer

5 March 2012 16:11
Music Video Video
heaven oscar hudson polydor spike morris teed totally enormous extinct dinosaurs

Nina Kraviz: Ghetto Kraviz

While I was editing Afterlife together with James Mountford back in 2009, I came across a tune called Pain in the Ass by some Nina Kraviz which completely distracted us from the job at hand. We did some investigating and after a few clicks found some photos of this Nina, who back then was relatively unknown in our circles. We were still running high on inspiration with the Afterlife video and felt like we had stumbled on a great subject to make our next video project, so I dropped her a message and suggested to make something together, sending her some of my videos. She responded sooner than expected expressing interest but saying that videos weren’t in her schedule at the time.

So last September while I was hanging out in Spain, she posted a status message on Facebook asking for someone to make her a video for an upcoming single. I don’t usually do this sort of thing, but I responded. Within a couple of months I’m on a flight to Berlin (delayed by 10 hours… yes, ten), meeting up with Nina, shooting for a few hours in the streets and finally grabbing a couple of hours sleep before heading out to Arena the following day.

Finally being under the club lights, surrounded by smoke with Nina in the viewfinder, often brought me back to when I first got in touch with her, when I didn’t really believe anything would ever come out of it. Classic example of the great times we’re living in.

…Rambling as usual!

The video wouldn’t have been made possible without the help of
-Hakan Can who helped me out immensely during the shoot
-Jon Hester for the support during my airport troubles, for killing it at 4AM in the freezing streets of Kreuzberg despite having to catch a 7AM flight.
-Georgina Philp for her great performance in the venue.
-Arena for letting us use their incredible space
-Christian Fritzenwanker for Nina’s makeup
-Nina for the enthusiasm and patience and for trying to make this happen!

GO BUY Nina’s album!! beatport | juno | itunes

Credits
Directed by David Terranova
Dancers: Jon Hester, Georgina Philp
Location: Arena
Hair & Makeup: Christian Fritzenwanker

28 February 2012 14:46
Music Video Video
berlin Georgina Philp Jon Hester music video Nina Kraviz rekids

Interview on The Avant/Garde Diaries

Back in December during my 2 day stay in Berlin for Nina Kraviz’ music video, I met up with my good friend David Shapiro who introduced me to a young upcoming film director called Hakan Can. Hakan had a few weeks downtime before his next short movie, so he had been asked by The Avant/Garde Diaries to direct one of their next episodes and to feature someone of his liking. Over our impromptu lunch he told me he was interested in featuring me, so within a couple of hours I found myself in the K-MB meeting room discussing the logistics of putting this episode together.

A month later I went back over to Berlin to find Hakan and his team had built a great set in a studio in Berlin, with a couple of actors and a few interesting props. My videos were playing on 3 screens in the background, and I was supposed to talk about myself and about who or what I found avantgarde these days.

Unfortunately I’m not the most natural speaker in the world, so it took us far longer than expected for me to spit out the words I had prepared. But the topic I chose (“the artists’ revolution”) is something I feel strongly about: the term avantgarde these days is widespread and has almost lost its meaning. Becoming an artist is far more achievable than it was years ago, with technology and the internet we’re discovering that we are all gifted with something or other, and we each have the power to use that talent and to show the world what it is. This is just a modern day phenomenon: years ago becoming an artist was something reserved for the elite, for those who really committed their whole lives to a dream.

Obviously there’s the bad side of this (no need for names), but I just ignore that and just enjoy the fact that I can find so much inspiration a few clicks away, and I can find so many relatively unknown people that I admire and can work together with.

You can read the full article on The Avant/Garde Diaries website and check out the other far more interesting people!

Credits
Directed by Hakan Can
Produced by Mercedes-Benz

Press & Screenings
The Avant/Garde Diaries

7 February 2012 18:47
Life
avantgarde diaries hakan can interview

Viktoriya

My friend Lucia Martinez shot this great video during a fashion shoot for Harpers Bazaar the other day. She came round my place and I put it together using two tunes from my buddy D.I.E.I.N.M.O.N.O.

The model is Viktoriya Sasonkina

Credits
Directed by Lucia Martinez
Edit by David Terranova
Music by D.I.E.I.N.M.O.N.O.
Model: Viktoriya Sasonkina

1 February 2012 17:21
Fashion Video
colour grading d.i.e.i.n.m.o.n.o. editing fashion lucia martinez Viktoriya Sasonkina

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