Here’s four videos to keep you entertained. Two for new songs, two for some not so new songs. Jennifer Left and Abi Wade released their new singles yesterday (and Jennifer Left is having a launch party for hers at the Blind Tiger on Thursday). Mosaic by Fear of Men and Spectre by Curxes both came out earlier in the year, but the videos have only just appeared:
Before we head out to the Dome Studio bar for the Oxjam Brighton Takeover tonight, here’s a few bits and pieces for you to listen to and watch.
We mentioned Al Chamberlain’s Train Song in our review of september’s Bleeding Hearts Club, and since then it’s turned up as a free download on Soundcloud. Go and grab it now – it’s one of my favourite tracks of the year.
Next is a new video by Omega Male, half of whom is Fujiya & Miyagi’s David Best. Take a look at Testosterone here:
Then we have Ital Tek with the eponymous title track from their new album Nebula Dance, which comes out tomorrow:
Finally, we have beautiful, trippy video Ayla by the Maccabees
We wrote about the New Union single a few weeks ago, but when we did, it was a weeks before it was released, and it was before the video up. The single came out on monday, so to remind you of the fact that it’s out, here’s the video:
New Union are launching the single at a free gig at Fitzherberts on Friday Night.
Here’s another blog post of a couple of assorted media that have come to our attention that we’d like to share.
First up we have the b-side to the upcoming Fear of Men single coming out on Too Pure that we wrote about a few weeks ago. Mosaic, which is already getting airplay on BBC 6Music, is out two weeks today and the flip Your Side sounds like this:
Next is a remix of one of the tracks from Cate Ferris’ Deep Breath, Ready, Get set GO EP. Condensation has been remixed by Talking Books, and doesn’t feature on the cd:
Finally we have another video for the next single from Bat For Lashes upcoming album The Haunted Man. This is the video to accompany All Your Gold, which also comes out on October 15th:
In case you haven’t seen it, the video for the new Jennifer Left single has landed. Diggory is the second release to come from her forthcoming album Hushabye, which has been produced by Tim Bidwell, and the video has been made by Thom Undrell, who also put together the fantastic video for Black Dog earlier this year. Diggory hits the shelves on 5th November, and Jennifer is having a launch party at the Blind Tiger on the 8th November. See you there!
A new song and accompanying video by Milk & Biscuits has turned up on Vimeo (via Brakes Facebook page). It’s lovely stuff – it starts off as lovely pastoral pop before rocking out for the second half. The video is rather beautiful too:
Here’s a few videos that have come our way recently – it’s been barely a week since the last one, but they keep rolling in. There’s some folk from Ingrid Plum, who’s playing at the Bleeding Hearts Club on 10th September and Cordelia who’s supporting House of Hats at the Brunswick tomorrow night, then some Hip Hop from Astro-Physics, and some indie rock from The Kingsmiths, so there’s definitely something for everyone there:
We’ve come across a few videos in the past week or so which I thought I’d share. First up is Dear Michael by Fragile Creatures, which we wrote about back in June. They’ve finally got a video to go with their debut single. Next up is House of Hats with their next single Rivers Will Run. We interviewed them about their previous animated video not long ago. Then we’ve got the video for the new King Porter Stomp single which is out on Monday. Finally, we’ve got a new offering from King of Cats. We meant to write about his cassette that came out on Reeks of Effort a little while ago, but somehow got a bit distracted:
Charming video by her sister for this song ‘Sparrow’ from the new Woodpecker Wooliams album due to drop in September. It’s called ‘The Bird School Of Being Human’. Can’t wait!
Last December, House of Hats released their eponymous “House of Hats” EP, and decided to make a video for the track This Love. The band have made a fantastic animation for it, in collaboration with film maker Finn Hopson, which only got released to the world last month. I caught up with Finn and James, Alex and Rob from the band to find out how it all came about, and why it’s taken so long to appear.
The first version of the video was made at the time of the EP by James, who plays guitar and has also designed of all of the band’s artwork so far. It was shot on an iPhone and everything was hand drawn and captured and assembled using traditional stop motion methods. James tells us “It had a shakey quality to it, which was very charming but it didn’t have a quality that matched the music, really”.
Finn Hopson’s day job is profession filmwork, doing everything from video editing for TV, to making animations for corporate clients. Around the time the orginal video was made, Finn had made a time-lapse video and showed Alex. He was impressed, and showed Finn James’ original iPhone effort and asked if Finn could do anything for them. Finn said “Why not? I’ll take your little things, I’ll move them around, I’ll have it done next week!”. Things took a little bit longer that though.
When Finn asked for the James’ artwork from the original version, he got an envelope stuffed with hundreds of cut out figures, each meticulously labelled, some still with blu-tack on them, and a seventeen page email of notes detailing exactly how everything works! James says “I didn’t know how detailed Finn wanted things, so I told him exactly”. Finn counters “What I said was ‘could you write down roughly where you’d like things to happen?’ and you had it word for word all of the way through all of the lyrics, syllable by syllable!”, to which Rob adds “That’s James through and through!”.
Finn explains “I tried to do it stop motion in my camera originally and try and do it frame by frame with stills, and I got a little way into it and after about a day I realised that you shoot 25 frames a second worth of stuff for a few seconds and suddenly you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of photos all of which need a little bit of fiddling and then exporting and then putting together into a movie and then if it’s wrong you have to go back and start again from scratch. So I did that a few times and realised that I should do it differently.”
The final version starts off with stop motion – the book opening at the beginning is put together shot by shot, but from that point on it becomes scans of the illustrations laid out in a virtual 3d environment, treated and processed and sprinkled with Finn’s magic touch to make it look less synthesised. “Where there are faces it’s often not just one face but a scans of multiple faces blended together digitally” Finn says. “Where the original iPhone version had one tree, I was given free reign to use multiple versions of these to embelish to the world in the video, but everything you see is from James’ original drawings”.
All this leaves us with one unanswered question – why are we only seeing the video now? The reason is that the band’s next single is coming out next month and the PR agency they’ve got working for them asked them to hold it back to help with the push for that. We’ll be writing more about that in a few weeks time. In the meantime, you can buy This Love and the rest of the House of Hats EP from iTunes here.
Brighton Music Blog 