Here's one of my music/art video "experiments" which I am most proud of and how it came to be is interesting for Tape Head history. Back in the era before owning a music library on CD or vinyl I taped a lot of radio to listen to on my own. Not even with any real purpose other than assorted genres, and a favored source was student run FM-88, a function of Syracuse University. They always had the most ambitious programming and one afternoon in 1982 I caught a promotion for a show called "Pseudo Cybersound" which promised futuristic fusion jazz similar in nature to the older music by King Crimson which I'd become enamored with. The show ran from midnight to four AM on a Friday and I made sure to have a good buzz on for the occasion. Set myself up with a high quality TDK chrome tape, hitched on the headphones and began recording.
True to form I fell asleep twice during the show, the second time for good and mom helpfully turned off the tape deck after about an hour of the stuff. All of it unknown to my ears save Peter Gabriel's "I Don't Remember" which opened the show. Listening to the tape became an obsession: It was Canterbury scene fusion rock unlike anything I'd ever heard and looked after the tape for years. Round about 2006 or so I dug it out and challenged myself to identify which cuts were by whom and track down the albums. Some were identified by the DJ but the most mysterious & rewarding were not. Gentle Giant's "His Last Voyage" being the one which took me the longest to crack, and there is still one more I've never been able to identify yet.
The biggie "keeper" cut of the set had to be this one, which was easily enough identified by the DJ as being by George Duke, whom I knew vaguely as a keyboard operator associated with Parliament/Funkadelic. But I was unable to find an example of the cut when sampling assorted online sources and in late 2011 (when fascinated by the Hammond Organ) came upon the idea to make a YouTube video upload of the song (as recorded off FM-88 including the DJs intro) based on just a cell phone picture of the moon & ask for help. Which worked by the way, someone from my own social circle instantly naming the song and the album thusly easily scored.
But a funny thing happened. The "video" took on a life of its own. I merely assembled it out of various items which happened to be on my hard drive. Somehow it became a narrative about an inner travel to outer space using footage shot on a camping trip + NASA stock footage of a lifting body test with a few astral images thrown in for good measure. Much of the video is feedback from over saturating the color & contrast settings on iMovie 3 and applying pre-set filters to the results. A small star-like Spaceship of the Imagination takes the viewer out of orbit into a extended head trip of stars and buzzing halo effects, then deposits them back in the parking lot across the street from my parent's house under the moon where the whole thing started.
The idea wasn't so much to set the song to video, it was to generate images which would pulse and move in concert with the music, and played a significant role in re-organizing my brain to think visually again after several years of not making art.
All I can say is it works, and the upload has proven popular with George Duke fans including embeds on a couple of music blogs. I'd like to think he's seen it and decided it was cool enough to let alone.
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