Some incredibly vivid dystopic vision for you. Film director Romain Demongeot and electronic music artists De Andria & Ghisal give us "Love 2062", a picture of what love may look like when civilisation as we know it comes to a shattering end. But it's also a picture of what addiction could become when embedded technology plays a starring role in sparing us from a desolate reality. Even for a few hours. Think heroin, opium, The Matrix and Inception crammed into a neat little shot.
That's the uncomfortably apt description for Lernert & Sander's music video creation for "Elektrotechnique," a single released by Dutch band De Jeugd Van Tegenwoordig.
There were a few moments while watching this where I got serious wince reflex, which is part of what makes it neaty. I don't want to be dealing with that hacksaw paddle thing though.
Lernert & Sander are Amsterdam-based artists whose aim is "to make simple and communicative works, which take little note of the existing borders between contemporary art and commercial projects.Their highly aesthetic, humorous and dedicated works often challenge the viewer, in a simple but very effective way."
It is not a bad philosophy, particularly if you're loyal to it.
In the last few years, advertising has turned a few tricks on the "choose your own adventure" concept. There was Twix's little hook-up story of 2008. Notably, Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO's "Choose a Different Ending" effort about knife crime for the Metropolitan Police won a Grand Prix for Good at the most recent Cannes Lions.
But this is probably among the more interesting takes on the genre in terms of production quality. In partnership with Vevo, which claims to be precipitating the evolution of music, musician Andy Grammer released the following video for single "Keep Your Head Up."
If you have trouble watching it, that's because Vevo is currently only available for streaming in the United States and Canada. But what it offers is a series of simple choices that enable the user to decide what happens next within a fixed amount of time - two separate ideas that have to be taught to the user in a matter of seconds, well-executed in this case. This enables the outcome to flow in time with the music.
The transitions from one moment to the next, whatever your choice, are seamless. (To maintain this harmony, the options are limited - what colour shirt, dancing waiter or not, etc. - and repercussions play out in seconds, with little deviation from very basic shenanigans.) While the music may not be your thing, the work is intuitive and clean clean and will hopefully stimulate other ideas in this vein.
This is Grammer's debut music video, leaving anticipatory curiosity about how he'll top this next time. But in terms of how tough this two-day feat was (as a first, no less), Grammer says the keys were timing, solid planning and patience.
“Because the choices are so different, I had to keep doing each scene over in different ways," he said. "It was, ‘Put on this shirt. Now put on this shirt. Now we need the big guy to jump out of the cake. And now the stripper.’ It was a mad dash.”
Bang Bang Bang: Retro-style magic brought to you by Mark Ronson and The Business Intl. Also, if you ever wondered what happened to Q-Tip ... I guess he's been time traveling.
This open letter made me love OK Go and want to buy their music (which is also pretty nifty).
What's it about? In short: how our consumer fight for liberation from Big Extortionist Record Labels™ has made it really hard for the one-time champions of said REVOLUTION!! to both take money from record labels and get their YouTube videos embeddable.
Also, OK Go explains why it'll never get 50 zillion views on a video again. You'll cry for the passing of a time -- when things were wild, online video was anarchic and that fume in the air was laced with hope.
I give you the music video for "Two Weeks," the first single off Grizzly Bear's Veckatimest -- a very nice album, btw. The track is dreamlike, distant and nostalgic, as if you're listening from a great distance; but what really gets me is that the video focuses entirely on the slow strange movements of four faces, which have an unsettling quality that hits you from moment one.
Whenever I put this on I can't help but sit still, my eyeballs ravishing what feels like the miles of data conveyed by the slightest change in their expressions.
Everybody I've shown this vid to is creeped out after the first :15 without really being able to explain why. Toward the end, light starts pouring out of the characters' eyes and mouths all sinister-like, and we suddenly feel validated: "I knew there was something off about these guys!"
If I ever doubted the adage that 90% of communication is nonverbal, I certainly believe it now.
