Patterns from a train window, an 80s Net Art extravaganza, and Phil Spector meets weird nature. Music vids for joy
If you are feeling a little… overwhelmed by the current context… here’s some sheerly joyful pop video for you, from the kitschy to the abstract.
From Creative Review, on the video above:
The McGloughlin Brothers have created the music video for ATK, the first single released by Bonobo since his album Fragments. The duo, made up of brothers Páraic and Kevin, have created numerous pieces of work in the past that twist scale, perspective and motion into compelling sequences, with recent credits for A$AP Rocky and Max Cooper.
The high-speed video for ATK takes viewers on a journey looking out of a train window, and is reminiscent of Michel Gondry’s iconic video for the Chemical Brothers track Star Guitar. It pieces together a string of cuts that illuminate the patterns and graphic motifs hidden in everyday places, including a particularly satisfying clip of a galloping horse.
“We wanted to create a minimal film embodying ideas of serendipity and perception, allowing the world to reveal itself in unusual ways spontaneously,” the McGloughlin Brothers tell CR. “If you have ever looked out of a train window to see the wires and tiles weave and dance in a magical way, this, in essence, is what we wanted to capture in our film.”
From Creative Review again:
Marrying dolphins, animated cats, crude animation styles, and a ton of nods to that distinctive Net Art, early web style that’s so in vogue right now, the new music video for Domino Records artist Superorganism is a joyfully surreal little slice of strangeness.
The video was created by Berlin-based animator and director Aeva (real name Dan Jacobs), who connected with London band Superorganism through its management company, having worked with other artists on its roster including Hot Chip and LA Priest. Jacobs had initially just been brought in to work on the video for the band’s song Teenager, but “we found a good rhythm and I ended up working on the whole album campaign,” he explains.
From THE JOY OF VIOLENT MOVEMENT:
Jonathan Personne‘s third and latest single, “À présent” sounds indebted to Scott Walker‘s orchestral pop and Phil Spector‘s famous Wall of Sound production but with a greater emphasis on the jangling rhythm section, which subtly pushes the whole affair into a more contemporary realm.
Thematically, the song depicts a world where excess, speed and love coexist in a setting that’s kind of a synthesis of Romeo and Juliet and James Dean’s life with the song’s central couple dying in a horrific accident.
Animated by Mathieu Larone and Henry McClellan, the accompanying video for “À présent” is abstract but centered in dualities, evoking the album’s themes: the animation is both childlike and disturbing, broodingly dark and colorful. But throughout, the intention was to present the optimistic vision of a new beginning.
“Mathieu and Henry were able to translate the song into images, and it’s just beautiful! It’s like an excerpt from the movie Fantasia, only weirder, darker, and done by the NFB rather than Disney,” Jonathan Robert says.