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.)