Love to Bradford, Lockett, Moses, Josh, Cole, Kristin, 4AD, Ace New York, Shake Shack, Dana, Paul, David, Ryan, Ed, Alex, Christchurch / Libya / Egypt / Wisconsin unions, Emma, Lyndsy, Laetitia, Lou, Lou's friends (who I don't remember their names), Alix, Jack, Julie, Paul, the makeup girls and the hair guy who did Don King's hair his first day of work, Pedro, Stoopid Boo, Em & Back Pockets Family, Sirius Bee, Brett W Thompson, all my heavenly WonderRoot, Big House, Black Castle, and Die Slaughterhaus brothers and sisters, all of my heavenly brothers and sisters, all the people that watched it on TV, all the people that watched it on the a computer, the people that made that commercial with the phone number 666-6666, my mom, my dad, my whole family, all my ancestors, all everyone's ancestors, God, Krishna, the eternal Clear Light, the infinite cosmic drone, and the awesome cabbie that drove us to LGA while we were talking about chambers and Cole told a story about Michael Jackson wanting to implant human vocal chords into Bubbles so he could communicate with his chimpanzee companion. They share over 96% the same DNA structure. I forgot how close Lockett said humans are bananas are.
In that taxi Bradford pointed out the NY skyline, which looked like the credits to a badass 80s movie with saxophones. Hundreds of miles and hour in the future, in 2011 the street lights cast a radial gradient on the surface of this Heavenly Wheel. Welcome to Atlanta.
Saw Deerhunter in Birmingham thanks to superfan and Atlanta videographer ifilmbands (click here for his ATL-riffic youtube page) and they were tired after more than a month straight of touring, so for an encore they played every song in the setlist again! The next day I saw real live deer in the Georgia mountains while visiting dad up north. During the day we went to the top of a mountain and there was a trading post with the stuffed deer, bear, and hawk you see above you in 3D (helps to have Back To The Future-style glasses). When you see a family of live deer, you know it's a rare event, and a special moment, because the minute you are conscious of them they are already slipping away into the forest. Their presence is ephemeral, but it pervades and adds a magical ambience to your experience. It makes sense why Deerhunter is called what they are. Good luck with them on their new album! 4AD seems to be really getting their name out there, I hope for the best!
Since the release of their full-length album Death From Beyond the Grave in 2008 The Spooks have only surfaced a few times to play surprise concerts, sometimes performing weird covers ("Burning Love", "Ghost Riders in the Sky") or unrecorded originals ("High On a Cloud"). Here's a few very rare recordings for the fan -- please be advised these are extremely LO-FI! If you already own the record and/or have it ripped, download these and put them in the same folder and file them under "bonus tracks".
Mark Of the Covenant - Outtake from the album recording, taped sometime around 2004 in Dunwoody (???) A version of this song appears on the record in even shittier sound quality, but tbh this is my favorite recording.
Now I'm A Spook Trapped In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts - Live from an Eyedrum show for WRASfest in 2009 featuring an all-star lineup and an extended krautrock noise ending. Robotripping is recommended for peak listening experience.
Untitled New Song - From a rehearsal for the last show the Spooks played in 2009. This song was learned at most 10 minutes before this performance, but it already sounded pretty badass.
In the spring and summer of 2003 when the Kiwis were joining the Black Lips and the Lids on the first Die Slaughterhaus releases, I went around with a tape recorder and captured practices, jam sessions, ambient talking, the DSH yell, the start of a boxing tournament, and other miscellaneous noises. For some reason I kept switching the tape on and off, so it's more music concrete-abstract than anything narrative. It starts in the Alphabets house (home of the Alphabets, Wet Dreams, early Deerhunter shows, etc) and the rest is at the 2nd Die Slaughterhaus, which was right down the street. This is all culled from one day. Gives you an idea of how much music was going on back then...
Visit my flickr page for my archive of Atlanta 2KXX Musical Artifacts. Photographs from the original Die Slaughterhaus, ancient flyers from pre-Black Lips days, Deerhunter setlists from some of the few shows I played with them, gig posters from the Super Madrigal Brothers 2002 tour with Momus, etc. etc.
Just got yet another spam post from the newly titled Deerhunter Videos & Blog Fame Span. One of the first posts on this blog, I made this pair of Deerhunter videos from "Microcastle" in 2008 and got published on Pitchfork and Stereogum and more site, and two years later I am graced with the anarchist surreal computer art known as spam poetry.
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On my flickr page I recently uploaded a trove of Die Slaughterhaus early 2000s show posters and flyers. It's a small collection because probably hundreds of flyers were made for Atlanta shows in 2001-2004, but it's a pretty good catalog of bands that were playing around in the early Die Slaughterhaus scene during that period.
I don't remember what came first the idea for this video or the idea to use this music, because they're both pretty inseparable in my mind. The first time I heard Microcastle and Weird Era it was an epic journey through my favorite seasons of Fall and Winter and even hearing it now at the beginning of summer makes me think back to autumns past. But the subtler and more acoustic songs brought to mind the spring, or at least some kind of tropical rebirth. In Atlanta the past month has been solid overcast skies and rain which makes it feel like the kind of seasonal limbo this video resides in.
"Green Jacket" the song is an example of effortlessly simple songwriting; a haunted melody shadowing an ever-rising cycle of just five piano notes. The video began as a brainstorm and a number of visual ideas and then I hunted for the appropriate images and got them all together. The forest is from a place in Atlanta we call The Lost City, a long-abandoned complex that only exists as spray-painted ruins. When we were kids we used to set up campfires there and get drunk and be young. The piano was pieced together in Blender 3D from an number of freely available 3d piano models.
I synced the piano to the video with motion tracking, which is my first attempt at motion tracking, and to be honest I'm pretty hooked on it, it's a really cool effect and very fun to try and get working. At first I told AE to track a dot of light on one of the trees but realized this didn't work so well because the light was being affected by the shadows as time went on. Next I tried two points, tracking for rotation as well as position, but it jump amplified the jumpiness of the whole thing. The best tracker I could find was on a stationary branch that was dark against the sky and bent at a nice angle so that the software could easily make it out. Motion tracking was the main reason why I wanted to make this video, though any desire to keep it realistic flew out the window as soon as I started piling on the effects.
The rest is superimposition, oversaturation, and my continuing overindulgence in AECS3's Glow effect. I can't help myself, it always seems to turn real things into dreams.
This is my second HD short but I think I'm starting to realize the limits of online streaming video because in full screen and in HD this video looks amazing and mystical and enveloping while embedded in a webpage the impact is seriously reduced. I feel that way about all my videos but this one especially. The vimeo site has a link to download the HD version, which my year-old laptop is actually struggling to play. You can also see the video on youtube if you have the same problems!
These are videos for songs from Deerhunter's new album Microcastle, which has just come out on Kranky and 4AD records, and which is flawless and wonderful. I had talked to Bradford about doing some video and I knew this was a fall/winter record, so upon finding myself going up Borestone mountain in Maine in the middle of October at peak season for color-changing leaves, I captured the footage that ended up in these videos. Cover Me (Slowly) kept making me think of the beginning of Twin Peaks so when I found a waterfall at the foothills of the mountain I knew it was meant to be. I changed the tint to match some of the cover art, a pink picture of someone with a skull in their eye. I played with how the video synced to the audio a number of different ways before trying random alignments and finding parts in the original unedited footage that would line up with cues in the music. I find this to be a much more natural way of scoring video to audio and usually you end up with something nice you wouldn't have thought of consciously. I really like Agoraphobia but didn't want to make a video to that unless the band members were included in it.
I was in the back seat of my aunt's car going up Borestone mountain and riding to the spot where you get out before you hike up it, and playing with the video camera as it was zoomed in really far into the trees, which gave me the idea for the Microcastle video. The speed and variety of colors flying by reminded me of the rush you get at the end of this song, which is a soaring coda after a very peaceful and reserved verse section. For the beginning I wanted some kind of fall still life that shimmered with the sound of the song. The shimmering effect was pulled off by syncing the audio amplitude directly to the opacity of the image, and I ended up using footage from the top of the mountain. Climbing Mount Borestone was like a standard hike until the last couple hundred feet, which was pretty much a vertical climb up the face of the mountain and felt like an epic task. So once we got to the very top, and you could see all over Maine, everything got very still and quiet, and I found a little pool of water with a few plants growing around it. When I went through my footage to pick out what to use for Microcastle, it felt perfect; on top of that mountain on a bright fall day, it was a timeless, concrete, physical manifestation of the song.
Here are some 3d anaglyph images I made from the trip up the mountain:
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