It’s over a year since I made this video, I’m very happy to finally be able to release it.
This tune has been very special to me from the first time I heard it, back in my London days when I didn’t really have any dealings with Minus, and since then I became a huge fan of JPLS, even more so after hearing “The Depths” album.
At the period when I first heard Spooker, I was starting to edit Lydia K, and for my initial test I actually used Spooker as the soundtrack. You can check out the test here: Lydia K / mood 1. In the end I went with some other music and ditched the first version.
So by the time last summer arrived, two years later, I had made some contacts at Minus (thanks to my Minus Embed video), and I remembered about this test I made so I sent it to JPLS, who I’d never spoken to, and asked if he’d be ok with me making a longer version, and he said yes. That’s pretty much the story, and since then we’ve been keeping in touch via ichat and a few weeks ago in NYC we got to meet up for the first time which was really cool.
And now for the overrated schpiel on the video, which is what video art is all about. I’ll try to avoid using terms like “exploring” or “boundaries” or “connection” or “discovering”. Instead, let’s say I just slowed down the footage and I really liked it. Then I mirrored it and I liked it more, but thought it was a bit obvious. So I dropped some distortion effects on top of it, it wasn’t obvious anymore and it became quite creepy so I really liked it. Then I added some grain, and did some funky things with the curves… NICE. I tried to do some funky edits, but it just didn’t go with the music. I just like the simplicity of the cuts, it’s not pretentious, and it goes with the retro feel of it.
I’ve been submitting it to various video festivals all over the world, and for each one they ask me to fill out a synopsis or a description. Any suggestions as to what I should write? I always leave that part blank. Probably why no-one ever picks it up, apart from Video is the Only Constant in London and then at Digital Graffiti in Florida who both screened it.
In other news
TUMBLR As you may know I’ve been populating my tumblr account with all sorts of videos that I like, usually a mixture of acid video art, dramatic fashion videos, or just underground music visuals. The other week I built a flash player that loads up the entire feed so that essentially you can play all the videos back to back in fullscreen without having to navigate, perfect for those times when you just want to sit back and watch some cool random stuff. Also great for parties if you have a projector. Check it here. Also, with the launch of my company FALKOHAUS we’ll be upgrading this tumblr to something more official, calling it NIGHTHAWKS. But for now just keep tuning into the tumblr account: davidterranova.tumblr.com
PLASTIKMAN FILM Still going. Almost there. Yes I know. Shh.
BLOC This week the edit for the BLOC film begins. Featuring Laurent Garnier, Matthew Dear, Visionquest, Magnetic Man and other.
SECRET! Something pretty cool has come up.
FASHION FILM I’ll be travelling to London in a few weeks to work for a couple of days on a extremely cool fashion film with James Mountford.
KRIX on The Creator’s Project My visual/music got talked about here. Read my original blog post about the piece here.
A long time ago I attempted to emulate in Flash a grid system developed by Burak Arikan who Ali Demirel collaborated with to produce the Minus Contakt visuals, I called it Minus Grid and made it into a screensaver. You can read the original blog post from back then.
During renders today I decided to upgrade the screensaver, as it needed some tweaking.
In the preview there is an extra bar full of controls that isn’t in the screensaver, and also in the screensaver the “lines” are always set to ON.
Don’t forget that once you install it, you can customize the grid size by clicking Options… in your System Prefs. Different grid sizes produce various interesting effects!
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After posting this I started browsing through Burak’s site again after all this time, and I’ve found some new screenshots of his Meta Control visuals. “Gridnet” is the true name of what I’ve been trying to replicate. Check out his incredible work here. This is the stuff that blew my mind and became a huge source of inspiration for me when I first went to the Minus Contakt show a couple of years ago.
Also to be noted is that my Minus Grid is actually (if you haven’t noticed already) quite far off from his original (run his Applet here). With the last version I decided to randomize the weight of the lines, and also to randomize whether two dots connect or not.
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!
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Update 5 September 2010 I’m getting lots of people asking me about the music used, so here is the tracklist:
A few weeks ago I attended Contakt, a yearly event hosted by the people from Minus. I came out feeling completely blown away, and the memories of the event flashed obsessively through my head for many days after. But apart from the musical side of things I was most taken by the visuals, the work of Ali M. Demirel and Burak Arikan. In a similar way to Minus’ sound, these visuals were MINIMAL, but had a catastrophic impact that was jaw-dropping.
Here’s an interview that might give you an idea of how Ali plugs into the Minus team.
One of the setups they made was based on a grid of dots, each with their own small square-shaped boundaries, watch it in action here, made by Burak. This is one of many other ideas based on a single concept called Meta Control: “Collection of visual/kinetic performative artifacts. These software pieces have a single organizing principle: their control mechanisms are not hidden and often exposed.”
The grid idea in particular has been stuck in my mind since I first saw it, probably because it was one of the few that I managed to figure out, so yesterday I tried to re-build it in Flash.
Stupidly, before I started building it I didn’t look for a video to refresh my memory, in fact I’ve just realized by watching this video that he didn’t actually use any vertical/horizontal lines to connect the dots, which is how I built mine.
Anyway, you can check out my first version, which I’ve creatively named MinusGrid here. Maybe I’ll upgrade it one day.
