Disquiet

One more recommended audio-video stream (nee “music video”) before the weekend. Following up on yesterday’s bit of aquarium stillness by Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski), the second most recent entry on his site’s film page is “Travel.” The glitchy yet tonal audio comes from two unreleased tracks. Whitman describes “Travel” as follows: “a compilation of crossfaded still digital-camera-in-movie-mode clips shot out of train windows during 2002 and 2003 throughout asia and europe. it was originally intended as a performance backdrop for kfw concerts and has since acquired a life of its own.” The visual pairings, resulting from the fades, include luggage conveyor belts and rolling countryside, trains and neon, and many layered cityscapes. There’s also a strange little animated interstitial that inserts a little humor. As for the music, “the soundtrack consists of two extended aleatoric computer music pieces. … one using the sounds of the hourly bell procession in barcelona’s pla?a de catalunya as its source, the other a rough version of a piece keith began whilst working on the ’73′ ep (long since abandoned).” And for those aspiring videographers in the audience, the footage was filmed “with a canon powershot g2 digital still camera in ‘movie mode.’” (The film archive is here, on Whitman’s reckankomplex.com website.)

Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) has updated his “film archive,” a web-based collection of little audio-videos, available as both streams and, for those readers with large external harddrives, downloads. Among the new additions is a 15-minute (and 86-megabyte) piece titled “Red Jellies.” He describes it on the site as “the first in a series of super-slow movement studies with minimal audio accompaniment. this one’s constructed solely out of found footage of deep sea jellyfish exhibiting some lovely bioluminescent behavior. … the soundtrack consists of a series of guitar-computer improvisations recorded around the same time as the ‘playthroughs’ material using the same systems / software / setup.”

Super-slow it is, so much so that a quick edit early on that brings the central jellyfish into the foreground is horror-movie jarring. The colors are just beautiful, though — these waves of the rainbow shuffling by as if along a biomechanical conveyor belt. The music is, as he mentions, derived from the same process that yielded his guitar-based Playthroughs album. The glitchy burbling and graceful ambience heard on “Red Jellies” both suit the visual subject matter. (The archive is here, on Whitman’s reckankomplex.com website.)

Among the most recent batch of new tracks at the 8bitrecs netlabel, at 8bitrecs.com, is “Les Demoiselles de L’Onde” by Planetaldol, a French solo artist. It’s a four-minute stretch of desolation, harsh winds giving way to industrial ambience. It’s sound design for a creepshow. Don’t listen alone. (MP3 track here; more on Planetaldol at planetaldol.free.fr.)