What's On My Mind

Here we have the most dazzling and elaborate video I’ve ever made. It’s a high-speed excursion through a surreal funk world -- where every person, place, or thing is a continuous portal into future action. This is a true boogie utopia, where everything is as it should be: the good guy always gets the girl, and the girls all have serious, major, monumental, big time curves.

The characters that inhabit this funk zone were created by Matt Rowland, and before they were brought to life, they resided on the album cover for Back To Reality, a compilation of underground boogie hits by Tony Cook. Tony, by the way, played drums in James Brown’s band The J.B’s, and produced some of the most sublime and ingenious funk of the 80s; The song’s vocalist is Dam-Funk, a modern funk mastermind himself. I’m a huge fan of both artists, as well as everything that Stones Throw Records puts out -- so it was a real treat to be asked to do the video for them. An iconic label of international esteem, Stones Throw personifies all things eclectic and creative, and I’m very excited about having some of my work figure into that equation somewhere, not to mention the exposure. It was only a couple years ago when I was just trying to figure out how to make music videos, and one of my earliest experiments happened to involve Tony Cook’s music, before Stones Throw reissued his catalog, and before I had substantial editing skills. Coming full circle, sort of like the video.

Now I’m gonna take you behind the scenes! Some of the theatrical concepts were predesigned, but it’s mostly organic silliness that I jury-rigged as I went. I used a mix of found footage and original animations -- the animations were hand-drawn, scanned, and sequence old-school style, while the other characters and backdrops were repurposed and re-animated, so to speak. A very wide variety of sources were involved in making this hodgepodge, and when you break down all the individual frames and little images, we’re talking over 700 files going into this bad boy!

I Can See 20,000+ Eyes

A little less than two years ago I became exposed to the most intoxicating Italo Disco song I’d ever heard, and I’ve been under its spell ever since. “Eyes” has a great beat and a heavenly synth buzz, but nothing is more arresting than Clio’s exotic vocals. As I listen to this song, I feel like a siren is drawing me to another planet -- I’ve just never heard anything like it. Last year, I made a psychedelic video for it and it has now passed the 10,000 Youtube hit mark.

Even if you can excuse my starry-eyed description of the song, you may still find it silly to celebrate such a non-achievement, considering how some of the most moronic things imaginable can get millions of hits on Youtube. That goes without saying, but the boundless size of the internet makes it almost impossible for some things to get noticed. In a nutshell, that’s why the play counts on my songs and videos are so low -- how my gems stay hidden, if you will. Even though “Eyes” is quite a rarity, people all over the world love it, and that’s how my video got so many views (and also I checked on it a lot.) Italo Disco is a total cult genre -- many of the fans are obsessive record collectors like myself, while others were actually out on the dancefloor during the height of the craze. These people have great taste, and the fact that so many of them have left such flattering comments is a big feather in my cap. My intention was to visually interpret a song that I loved, to try to recreate the picture that it painted in my head. It’s been a delightful surprise to find that I’ve struck a chord -- that people, like I am, are infatuated with Clio but also seem to particularly relate to the abstract imagery I’ve attached to the song. Perhaps the video is reminiscent of what they had imagined in their own minds, as if I captured the transcendence of the song through synesthesia, speaking subconsciously to the viewer. Then perhaps Clio is really an intergalactic empress, speaking in a secret language to hypnotize us into worshipping her. Well maybe that’s going a step too far. But the point is that the most optimistic view of the internet is to see it as a vessel for people to people from all across the world to communicate and share the best of what life has to offer. Despite my general cynicism, I can actually appreciate how gratifying the ‘ideal internet’ is. But seriously, give the ‘intergalactic empress’ theory some real thought.