Time for a new installment of LIVE EYE TV’s TV PARTY!, with ten videos from the last month that you just can’t miss. Some very cool work on the visual front, including the techno-pagan visions of Seattle design team WINTR in the new Niki and the Dove video for “The Fox”, Heidi Petty’s beautiful use of found footage for Lia Ices “Little Marriage”, and the thickly applied Suburban sleaze of Melissa Cha, for Dylan Ettinger’s “Wintermute”. In addition, fans of Parks and Recreation will recognize actress Aubrey Plaza’s awesome performance in the Father John Misty video for “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”! And that’s just scratching the surface. Stream the videos below, and get inside the post to read what’s up. OK, let’s watch some videos! CONTINUE READING
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VIDEO: Niki and the Dove “The Fox” Sub Pop Records [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: Holograms “ABC City” Captured Tracks [VIMEO]
VIDEO: Cloud Nothings “No Future/No Past” Carpark Records [VIMEO]
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VIDEO: Nicolas Jaar “Materials” Circus Company [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: Lia Ices “Little Marriage” Jagjaguwar Records [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: Father John Misty “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings” Sub Pop Records [VIMEO]
VIDEO: Lee Renaldo “Off the Wall” Matador Records [VIMEO]
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VIDEO: Young Magic “Night In the Ocean” Carpark Records [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: Chromatics “My My, Hey Hey (Into the Black)” Italians Do It Better [YOUTUBE]
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VIDEO: Dylan Ettinger “Wintermute” Not Not Fun Records [YOUTUBE]
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You will find stunning and visionary work in the new animated video for Niki and the Dove‘s track “The Fox”. Created by Seattle’s awesomely talented design team WINTR, spectacular CGI imagery follows a futuristic female protagonist as she assumes a fox’s head before leaping into the abyss Castaneda-style. Depicted in free-fall and then rocketing across space like the crazy flying Swissman Yves Rossy without the jet pack, our heroine tries on a series of indescribable masks while flying high above gorgeous mountain terrain towards some strange, trans-dimensional door to other worlds. And that’s just how it starts! The video’s imagined neo-pagan future is in perfect pitch with this Swedish duos mix of technological pop-extravagance and ancient, mythic yearnings…Okay, I’ll shut up now, and you just watch the video!
Hmmm…interesting. Right back to Sweden with this one from the four punks known as Holograms. A super-tight, post-punk vibe opens the song as keyboards oscillate with menace, and a brooding bass-line keeps everyone in-check, moshing mindlessly in a circle. Then, bam, the machine locks and lurches as the band spits out it’s bile, and we learn of all kinds of desolation in ABC City. The video is rad too. Snow and ice blanket the urban wasteland, and it looks like the guys play in some freezing, cinder block bunker as the drummer drums in his army-issue parka. I also love the shot where the dudes all flip off the giant smokestack belching smog, recognizing it as totem of domination, and acting accordingly!
In the new Cloud Nothings video for the track “No Future/No Past”, dad takes a mushroom trip, and realizes he is the Inverted Man. Or something like that! Director John Ryan Manning goes out of his way to skew perception and alter perspective on his single character, a sort of everyman dad-type, dragging him (literally) on a mind boggling journey from the comforts of his suburban house into his once familiar neighborhood, now strangely altered. Accomplished with an economy of images, and using this single motif of dad floating or being dragged out of the house and down the street, Manning, cinematographer Caleb Crossen, and actor Mike Gassaway depict, in a highly creative way, the psychic terror of having ones personality melt away into…
Speaking of psychic journeying, in the new video for the Nicolas Jaar track “Materials”, a boy wanders into Dreamtime finding a magic box of musical instruments labeled “Materials” just on the other side of waking. Induced by curiosity to walk deeper into the labyrinth, he encounters a slew of potent dream imagery straight outta the subconscious. While it turns out this is an “unofficial” video, the UK design team Pondr does a great job in creating a visual experience very akin to dreaming, and Jaar’s jazz inflected minimalist techno simmers and surprises perfectly as it’s accompanying soundtrack. In addition to producing music, Jaar runs the label Clown and Sunset. Last year’s LP, Space Is Only Noise earned him a heap of praise, including high marks from Pitchfork and four stars from The Guardian!
While it’s been just over a year since Lia Ices stunning LP Grown Unknown came out on Jagjaguwar, it’s the kind of record that reveals depth upon multiple listenings. For that reason we can hardly blame Ices for still wanting to release videos for tracks off the album. Heidi Petty‘s directed video for “Little Marriages” makes excellent use of found footage, putting video treatments over old avant-garde films of modern dance, whirling dervishes, close-ups of cat’s eyes, to create a moving narrative for Ices beautifully strange balladry.
Jay Tillman is no longer playing drums with the Fleet Foxes, and has again joined the ecclesiastical order of the Sonic cloth assuming the name Father John Misty. Tillman explains that the name is arbitrary saying, “…it’s kind of mischievous to write about yourself in a plain-spoken, kind of explicitly obvious way, and call it something like ‘Misty’. I mean, I may as well have called it ‘Steve’”. Okay, so look for Steve’s new album Fear Fun coming out May 1st on Sub Pop, and to hold us over till then we can download the track “Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings”, as well as check out the video starring Aubrey Plaza of NBC’s Parks and Recreation. You can’t beat the end of the video, when a barefoot Tillman scrapes her off the road and carries her like a sack of potatoes kicking and screaming, and you think, “aw, what a nice guy to help that poor girl”, until he throws her in the back of a cargo van like the psycho he is!
Next month Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo will release his solo album Between the Tides and Times on Matador. The album finds Renaldo aging gracefully as they say, wearing the mantle of an indie elder statesman with the ease of an accomplished dad. And, heck, why shouldn’t he, having accomplished and been apart of so as much important experimental art and music as he has. The guy deserves a victory lap! The video for the track “Off the Wall” was edited and mostly shot by Renaldo, and it composites live footage of him performing at the Glasslands in Brooklyn with, “…Battery Park trees, Holland tunnel, Frey in Walt Whitman’s forest, girl fr Calgary, MP3 experiment in Hudson River Park, David Linton installation at the Clocktower.”
Young Magic‘s music is often a strange hybrid of styles, but put together in such an organic and free-flowing way as to feel totally right. The track “Night In the Ocean” draws you in on warm, shimmering waves of keyboard and male/female vocals, before Isaac Emmanuel delivers a laconic, blissed-out rap about stellar visions. From there the song flows where it will like water into washes of lunar keyboard and far-out, choral melt-downs. This amalgamation of styles is mirrored by the fact that their album Melt (Carpark Records) was recorded using a portable studio in many locations across multiple countries including, “…old spy bases near Berlin, empty rooms in Iceland, kids’ playgrounds in Melbourne, and no water flats in New York.” The video for “Night In the Ocean” has a perfect vibe for the song with it’s 16mm footage of moon-bathed oceanscapes, and lovers engaged in amorous rituals!
If I’ve said it once I’ve said it before, the Chromatics sure have traveled some sonic distances, like a magic cat with 9 lives! Throughout it all, though, the band has stood proud on founding member Adam Miller’s stellar guitar playing. Even on some of their most deconstructed and punk work like the album Plasterhounds (one of my favorite album covers of the last ten years) Miller’s guitar is always there to shred or be shredded. It’s no wonder, then, that the Chromatics, in their newest incarnation with singer Ruth Radelet and drummer Nat Walker added to the band, would cover Neil Young’s classic “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)”, and that Miller’s guitar, all-cleaned up from it’s years shoveling the streets, would sound like the perfectly toned survivor it is! You can find this track on their newest LP Kill For Love (Italians Do It Better), as well as downloading it from their Soundcloud page. The video, filmed and directed by Alberto Rossini, and featuring the beautifully visaged Ruth Radelet in intriguing split screens, evokes the seductive disco gloss of the burned-out 70’s!
The new Dylan Ettinger video for the track “Wintermute” is directed by Melissa Cha, and it definitely turns the creep factor up to “11”. The video features a seemingly comatose nude male face down on the floor of an empty house under a revolving disco light as two semi-clad women act out a bizarre sexual pantomime! Something about the empty, ranch-style house with it’s cheap patio windows, and that damn disco ball, place the suburban sleaze in perfect pitch! “Wintermute” will be on Ettinger’s newest LP Lifetime of Romance, due out in the beginning of March via Not Not Fun Records.
