Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. A popular example is seeing colors while listening to music. Anyone can experience it in it’s adventitious form while using psychedelic drugs. There is also another form of synesthesia that is genetically based and constantly “on” with some people. The estimated prevalence of this in the population have varied between 1:20 to 1:20000. As a matter of fact, some might argue that “seeing stars” is a rather common experience.
There was a phase of scientific research between 1880’s and 1930’s, but due to difficulties in assessing and measuring subjective and internal experiences, the studies gradually waned. In the recent years, with the advent of more sophisticated neuroimaging methods such as fMRI, scientists have begun to study synesthesia again and synesthetes have formed organizations and community sites on the Internet.
It is a fascinating phenonomen and if indeed every 1 in 20 persons have mild synesthetic experiences there are a lot of implications in education, for example. The strength of the phenomen varies greatly and there is also variance between the prevelance of different forms as illustrated in the table at Richard E. Cytowic’s Encyclopedia of Neuroscience.
There are a number of other genetically inherited abilities (color blindness, perfect pitch, etc) that can produce rather unusual combinations if the person also happens to be genetically inclined to synesthesia.
While reading about it, it occurred to me that it is possible that some of the paranormal abilities that people are describing are in fact nothing more than a rare form of synesthesia perhaps combined with another extremely rare and unresearched genetically inherited sensitivity. People who claim to see “auras” of other people may be associating another ultra low level sensory experience with colors and therefore have a strong sense of color in the presence of another person. The physical or chemical activity that triggers the color experience could indeed be something as simple as the odor cues that the other person is emitting. The smell receptors in the aura-sensing persons nose could be transmitting the signals to an area in the brain where the cross-signalings takes place although they are not consciously experiencing any kind of peculiar aroma. As an analogy, it is well known that dogs have the ability to detect various forms of cancer in humans just by sniffing.
To take this theory a bit further and just for the sake of discussion: What if there is a gene that increases the magnetic sensitivity in humans on a cellular level, but it normally causes no sensory experiences whatsoever and therefore is quite difficult to study? Now, what if that gene is combined with an equally rare, say, radiation → visual or radiation → spatial synesthete gene? Again, it is easy to draw a parallels between species with primitive limbic systems that can predict earthquakes and use magnetic fields as a navigation aid. It has been found out that there is a tiny magnetite crystal in the ethmoid bone of humans. The ethmoid bone is located between the eyes, behind the nose. This magnetite is speculated to be vestigial, i.e. lost most of it’s original function during species evolution.
I would like to explore this idea in the form of an art piece or perhaps a short film. I welcome comments by anyone interested in this subject.
Being able to digitally capture moving images with an apparent quality of 35 mm film has been the proverbial Holy Grail of many people for a long, long time. Independent movie makers with a micro budget, art students, video artists, video production companies and a whole bunch of other organizations and individuals would love to have that elusive “film look” in their productions.
There are quite a few big time Hollywood productions being made with digital image acquisition right now, but the new thing is that some of these technologies are beginning to trickle down to a price level that small companies and even individuals can afford. Here’s a quick round-up of three solutions at a price point of less than 10000 dollars including a lense or two (say, a Zeiss
Planar T* 1,4/50 for example).
Nikon D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Nikon and Canon have both introduced DSLR cameras that can capture HD video. Nikon’s D90 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II can both capture decent HD video. Nikon is using motion JPEG compression and Canon is using the more efficient H.264. Nikon is capturing 720P at 24 fps and Canon is using 1080P at 30 fps. Unfortunately both of these cameras have only an exposure lock, but ISO and shutter speed are automatically controlled by the camera. This is not a very desirable behaviour for more ambitious film projects. Nevertheless they are a huge step up from video capture capabilities of previous DSLR models. A lot of people will most likely be using these cameras, especially the 5D mark II for a new style of independent film production called “web cinematography”. It’s basically a video/film production where the end product will be available only on the web… perhaps as a embedded video in a browser window, a downloadable quicktime file or even an entire film distributed over Bit Torrent. Have a look at this video by the cinema accessory manufacturer Zacuto to get a feel on how to pimp up a DSLR for professional productions.
The other big news this year was the announcement of Scarlet… a more affordable version of the Red camera, which has already been used in several Hollywood productions as the main camera. A price point of 3000 US dollars for a camera that can capture 3K resolution images would have been a laughable proposition just a few years ago. Some of the high-end digital cinema cameras such as the Panavision Genesis are not even available for purchase, but are for rental only. Scarlet has been projected to ship in 2009, but with a small and unique company such as Red, one never knows.
One of the many desirable qualities of the “film look” is the shallow depth of field. It is more easily created with a fully open aperture, but the effect is more noticeable with a larger sensor size. The most economical Scarlet will only have a 2/3 inch sensor which is the same size that is most commonly used in broadcast video cameras. To get as shallow depth of field on a 2/3 inch sensor as on a 35 mm sensor one would have to open up the aperture about 2 and a half stops additional stops. That is, on a 2/3 inch sensor you have to shoot at T1.9 to have the same depth of field as T4.0 on a 35 mm sensor.
2/3 inch is often seen as a completely inferior format to a “full frame” 35 mm sensor. If you have any doubts that a smaller sensor can’t be used for big time productions, have a look at the trailer of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The entire film was shot with a Thomson Viper, which has a 2/3 inch sensor. A very interesting interview with Claudio Miranda about the workflow can be found at the Studio Daily web site.
Besides shallow depth of field, “Film look” does have numerous other components to it. Sound is actually very important as well. One of the other key components is the latitude of the image, or the depth of the dynamic range in an individual frame. Scarlet has an obvious edge in this respect, because it records what is essentially an equivalent of RAW images in still cameras. It is a compressed image, but it does have high bit depth and therefore malleability that one needs in order to color correct or to put it in film terms “grade” it in the post.
Sony PWM EX-1 and Letus adapters
As far as HD image capture is concerned, what’s happening on the prosumer / low-end professional video front? The new big dog on that field is the Sony EX-1 / EX-3 duo which is Sony’s counter strike to Panasonic’s P2 format. Sony is using a new SxS card as a solid state storage solution for their new camera which can shoot at 60 fps for slow motion effects. The DSLR cameras mentioned above cannot do any slow motion effects, by the way. But the DSLR cameras do have that beautiful and saturated film look that everyone is after. How do you recreate that on EX1? The answer is a depth of field adapter that projects the image of a 35 mm lense on a ground class for the video camera to capture. You can get absolutely beautiful results with these, but they are bulky, very sensitive to calibration, inherently lose a lot of light in the optical path and they are quite pricey. However, at the moment, many people think that they are the best that current techonology has to offer for a relatively inexpensive way to capture film like footage on a digital camera. The XDCAM file format, while not as flexible as REDcode format, is still a step up from the DSLR video file formats.. as far as the flexibility for color correction is concerned.
For an assortment of sample videos with a depth of field adapter, have a look at these videos at Vimeo.
I believe that in the very near future there will be a revolution in the sheer amount of indie film production made with these new, affordable tools. I am eagerly waiting for more news about Scarlet. I can hardly wait to jump on this wagon and finally be able to produce relatively film like results without breaking the bank and virtually switching careers.
I produced a micro website for the finnish version of the Broadway musical Spring Awakening. In addition to information about the musical itself, the site contains a grungy typographic motion graphics Flash intro produced in Final Cut Pro and a web form to invite your friends to watch yourself on the unique stage seats on a specific date. The stage seats are likely to be sold out rather quickly. I advise to hurry if you are a student and you are interested in this sort of thing.
Spring Awakening is a Tony Award-winning rock musical with music by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater. The musical is based on the controversial 1891 German play of the same title by Frank Wedekind. Set in late-nineteenth century Germany, it concerns teenagers who are discovering the inner and outer tumult of sexuality. The original play was banned in Germany due to its portrayal of masturbation, abortion, rape and suicide. In the musical, alt-rock is employed as part of the folk-infused rock score. During the musical, characters sometimes break the fourth wall to express their motivations and desires directly to the audience.
Edit: I ended up repurposing the flash intro as a full HD pre-movie commercial for theatrical release. It was heavily modified and sweetened with a 5.1. surround sound track.
Dolphins are known to engage in complex play behaviour, which includes such things as producing stable underwater toroidal air-core vortex rings or “bubble rings”. There are two main methods of bubble ring production: rapid puffing of a burst of air into the water and allowing it to rise to the surface, forming a ring; or swimming repeatedly in a circle and then stopping to inject air into the helical vortex currents thus formed. The dolphin will often then examine its creation visually and with sonar. They also appear to enjoy biting the vortex-rings they’ve created, so that they burst into many separate normal bubbles and then rise quickly to the surface. Certain whales are also known to produce bubble rings, or even bubble-nets for the purpose of foraging. Many dolphin species are also known for playing by riding in waves, whether natural waves near the shoreline in a method akin to human “body-surfing”, or within the waves induced by the bow of a moving boat in a behavior known as bow-riding.
The wikipedia article about the intelligence of dolphins and whales is a fascinating read. While sleeping, dolphins appear to rest only one side of the brain at a time. This is sometimes given as an explanation to their exceptionally large brain size. Their brains (1500-1700 grams) are actually heavier than human brains (1300-1400 grams) and the wrinkles in them are of near equivalent complexity.
I’ve seen dolphins underwater once near the Eilat Dolphin Reed in the Red Sea. One of them came all the way to a nearby sandy tourist beach obviously seeking human contact for his or her amusement only. A delighted child ran to the dolphin and whatever they were doing, it was most obviously some sort of playful social interaction for both parties.
More recently, researchers at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii have been testing dolphins through an underwater touchscreen attached to a computer. There are no food rewards, so the dolphins use the touchscreen solely for intellectual stimulation. The scientists found that the dolphins weren’t particularly interested in abstractions, such as geometric patterns or artificial sounds. But they were very excited about touching the screen if it resulted in their seeing videos of other dolphins or hearing dolphin sounds. The next step will be to let dolphins choose video or audio sequences and then try to analyze why they’re making those decisions.
I can confirm this behaviour in humans as well. Even without any experiments, I know that people are much more interested in seeing other people and hearing human sounds compared to seeing geometric patterns or artificial sounds.
As computer games get increasingly photorealistic, it is sometimes difficult to discern between screenshots of modern games and actual photographs. Well, we are not there quite yet, but it is a fun conceptual idea to play around with. I formed a Flickr Group called Real Life Computer Game Scenery to have a little archive of images for “Real or Not?” comparison in the future.
While exploring photographs that might suit this definition, I quickly noticed that in real photographs there are often little “mistakes” that wouldn’t make it to a computer model. The random decay and debris is often almost too perfect in computer modelled scenes.
Please join and add a photograph or two if you happen to have anything in your archives that would be relevant to this group.
I usually don’t write negative reviews, but either it was the brain washing of the Vatican or perhaps Golden Compass is just a bad movie. The plot keywords made me salivate in anticipation, but as soon as the lights went out and the endless trailers and commercials had ended, I quickly found out that this particular film wasn’t my cup of tea. While Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra wasn’t exactly an untalented actress, she failed to breathe life to the synthetic, blue screened scenes. Nicole Kidman herself had slight troubles orientating to the invisible daemon friends who were all digitally added to the frames in the post, no doubt.
This is a problem I’ve seen in many, many films. I, Robot suffered from the same blue screen syndrome. So did Mirrormask by the way. (On the other hand, I did like Beowulf quite a bit… perhaps it was because it didn’t mix live action with CGI, who knows)
It is hard for an actor or an actress to imagine that they are talking to a 4 meter tall polar bear when they are actually just talking to a giant chroma key wall or, even worse, to the microphone in a tiny little voiceover booth.
Before I forget it, let me just mention that my favorite performance in Golden Compass was Sam Elliot as Mr. Scoresby.
Technology aside, I wasn’t swept away by the plot either. It felt very much like a made-to-order saga with a little bit of myths and scandinavian names thrown in for good measure. The film is based on a book by Philip Pullman, one of England’s most outspoken atheists. There is a strong anti-christian (or anti-dogmatic, to be more precise) undertone in Pullman’s script. On the other hand the fascination with the ancient mythology seems very shallow and gimmicky in this context.
I’ll give Golden Compass two stars out of five. Ahh, I’m looking forward to I am Legend to also give two stars only. This will equalize my ratings scale nicely and make it look more like a gaussian curve instead of a baseball cap with every other movie getting three and a half or four stars…
Well, I finally made it to redrum last night. To warm up for a night out, we doped up with some cava (Conde de Haro) and a nourishing meal at Grotesk. The tuna pastrami appetizer at Grotesk was excellent, by the way. Grotesk is a fancy fine dining place with relatively high prices on the menu, so I was surprised to see a high profile biker gang complete with emblems over there enjoying the creations of the chefs. It greatly enhanced the already eclectic atmosphere of the restaurant.
After a quick taxi ride, we ended up at Redrum, the club with allegedly best sound system around. Well, after last night I can confirm that the sound system is indeed unbelievable. It is built by Funktion One and combined with the unique interior the music sounded totally out of this world. Maybe I’m just used to the el cheapo systems at other clubs or maybe it was the Cava, but the acoustics in the wood paneled club sounded practically studio quality to me. You could easily chat with your friends without shouting and still hear the music with vibrant clarity. The bass was superbly satisfying as well. I think there are at least 6 or 7 layers of acoustic material on the walls.
If you are visiting Helsinki and dance music is your thing, I highly recommend redrum for the acoustic experience alone. Sometimes they host rock concerts as well.
The director also considered the story of Sunshine as an appropriate counterintuitive approach for the contemporary issue of global warming, with the death of the sun being a threat. Originally, Sunshine was scripted to begin with a voiceover talking about how parents tell their children not to look into the sun, but once told, the children would be compelled to look. Boyle described the sun as a godly personality in the film, creating a psychological dimension for the astronauts due to its scale and power. The director also described the film’s villain as based on light, explaining, “That’s quite a challenge because the way you generate fear in cinema is darkness.” The director also sought to have the characters experience a psychological journey in which each person is worn mentally, physically, and existentially and is experiencing doubt in their faiths.
I like to get a little dose of science fiction every now and then to keep the subconsciousness nourished with far-out ideas. Sunshine was just what the doctor ordered as far as the science part of the movie is concerned. In the movie a “Q-Ball” , the nucleus of a supersymmetric particle, gets itself lodged in the Sun. The hypothetical Q ball eats through normal matter, ripping apart the Sun’s neutrons and protons and converting them into supersymmetric particles. The Earth’s last and only hope? Why, to launch and detonate a gigantic nuclear bomb to fix the problem, of course!
Well, science aside, I think the film makers did a pretty good job with many other aspects of the film. The art direction and visual effects in general were well made. More importantly, they were also original and refreshing, which is not an easy task to accomplish in this day and age.
I found it particularly inspiring that the sun was treated as a god-like entity much like the ancient egyptian Sun God Ra and the aztec god Huitzilopochtli. As a matter of fact, sun has been worshipped for all of recorded history.
My personal prediction is that the Sun God is about to get quite angry while us mere mortals are thinning the ozone layer which is protecting us from his angry UVB eye.
This is the soundtrack to a consumer made iPod commercial that made it big time. It’s being remade in hi-def by TBWA for broadcast use.
Consumers creating commercials “is part of this brave new world we live in,” said Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey.
“It’s an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences,” Mr. Clow said. “People’s relationship with a brand is becoming a dialog, not a monolog.”
Check out the YouTube video that caught the eye of the ad agency.
The Oscar-winning actor spent months on a remote Fijian island for his new movie Cast Away and far from being an idyllic experience it proved to be something of a nightmare for the 44-year old star.
Not only did he have to lose 55lb in weight for the role and spend weeks up to his neck in water, the shoot almost turned to tragedy when he caught a serious infection.
“Just before we left the island I had a little sore on my knee and something got inside there. We left Fiji on the Friday and by the Sunday my leg was twice its normal size,” explains Hanks, looking more than a little relieved to be in the urban surrounds of London.
“I had to go to the doctors and I thought I was going to get it cleaned and some antibiotics to take. The next thing I know there were five doctors running around in a panic trying to figure out what was inside my leg.
“I underwent surgery that night and was out for three weeks. We had to shut down the movie. I was very close to blood poisoning, which can kill you. If I’d really been a castaway on that island, doctors told me I would have been dead in five weeks.”
I really liked Cast Away, but I don’t think Tom Hanks did a very good job with his method acting a.k.a. losing weight for the role. He had a full year to do it. He had a special “Weight loss trainer” that is credited at the end.
There was a lot of press about the weight loss and Mr. Hanks got completely bored with endless questions about it in interviews. Just to give a little perspective to Tom Hanks’ 55 pound loss, Christian Bale lost a third of his normal body weight (63 pounds) for his role in The Machinist. Tom Hanks had gained extra weight for the first part of the movie and I think that he simply returned back to slightly below his normal weight.
Although method acting doesn’t usually refer to physical alterations in an actor’s apperance, weight loss and gaining for a role is often seen as a measurement of actor’s commitment to the role. Sadly, sometimes things go a bit wrong when people commit themselves too deeply. Requiem For A Dream star Jared Leto was diagnosed with gout after losing weight for a film role.
Body weight is one of those things that you can’t yet fix in the post.
I just read an interesting story about the new generation of wiretapping technology that FBI is using in the USA. Coincidentally, three of the last Hollywood blockbuster movies I’ve seen (Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0 and Ocean’s 13) have all dealt with the general themes of “individual versus the surveillance system” and “we can see your every move at the hidden command center”. I also saw Wim Wenders’ “The Land of Plenty” which was about a Vietnam war veteran who had become more or less obsessed with surveillance.
I remember seeing scenes in Hollywood movies portraying the Echelon as early as 1994 (“Clear and Present Danger”), but recently it has become the most trendy plot element that you can have. The usual way to weave it into an action film plot is to have the protagonist somehow fool the system and simply outsmart the government agents at the hidden command center by switching the sim card in a phone or hiding behind a balloon seller at a busy railway station.
Bourne Ultimatum went completely over the top with the surveillance theme though. All I can remember about the plot was that the same scene was basically acted out in slightly different variations about 5 or 6 times. During the end credits they played the theme song by Moby.
Well, I guess my point is that not only the script writers, but also the audience in this seemingly less secure world have become fascinated with wiretapping and remote sensing. Whether it’s good entertainment or not, I can’t say. But I do know that during insecure times, horror films repeatedly become a more popular genre. A society based on the remote surveillance and monitoring of the potential threats in the neighbourhood is indeed a bit horrific.
David Keith McCallum, Jr. (born September 19, 1933) is a prolific Scottish actor and the son of concertmaster violinist David McCallum, Sr.. He is best known for his role as Illya Kuryakin, a Russian-born secret agent, on the popular 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E..
Although McCallum subsequently became a familiar face on television, he was never able to achieve the same level of popular success as he had done with his role as Kuryakin. His best-known roles were in Sapphire and Steel (opposite Joanna Lumley), as the lead in a 1970s remake of The Invisible Man, and as Judas Iscariot in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
In the 1960s, McCallum recorded some albums for Capitol Records with producer David Axelrod, such as Music: A Bit More of Me (1966) and Music: It’s Happening Now! (1967). The most well known of his pieces today is arguably The Edge, which was sampled by Dr. Dre as the intro and riff to the track The Next Episode. There is some controversy over what role McCallum actually played in these recordings, as he did not sing on the tracks (they are instrumentals), nor did he write them.
DJ Majestic Mood played a really nice set a few weeks ago at Palmenhaus. I asked him about a particularly interesting tune and it turned out to be from a weird 60’s album conducted by none other than David McCallum.
I wrote a draft for this entry earlier, but decided to postpone publishing it due to..uhm.. some eBay bidding activity. I am now the proud owner of both of his 60’s vinyl albums. I can’t wait to get back home to listen to them.
As a quick update to our Balkan tour, we’ve succesfully visited Budapest, Ljubljana, Split and the Island of Hvar. On the last night at the island we met an interesting character. He was a local island man, who had studied archeology and came up with the concept of “herbal tourism”. In a word, he was a herbalist. He graciously gave us a whole bunch of wild herbs which he had been collecting earlier that day with a group of Swiss tourists. Sadly, we had to leave for Split and we didn’t have a chance to interview him in more detailed manner. Split was a superb experience as well. Our accommodation was right next to Jupiter’s temple in the Diolectian palace, which is the most active and well preserved site of it’s kind in the world. It is part of the Unesco world heritage program and so is a part of Graz, where we are lodging at the moment.
I’m typing this at the hotel lobby internet terminal while slightly intoxicated, so this will have to do for now. Resuming normal blog update schedule when I’m back in Finland in the beginning of July.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up a rental DVD of Terry Gilliam’s latest creation Tideland. I knew that the film hadn’t been a commercial success, but that was nothing new as far as his works are concerned. I had enjoyed Brothers Grimm and come to think of it, every other movie by Terry Gilliam as well, so I decided to give it a shot. The movie is a roller coaster ride through the life and inner universe of a junkie’s daughter. It is rated R for “bizarre and disturbing” content and I can’t blame the rating people for that decision. It is disturbing and provocative, but at the end of the day, it is a kind of movie that sadly very seldom gets financing. It must have been obvious to even some of the financers that this might be a commercial flop around the premiere, but like many other Gilliam’s movies, I’m sure that it will recognized as a masterpiece in the years to come.
The plot is not very important and I don’t want to give it away. If interested, have a quick peek at the user comments at IMDB. According to director’s own words, this is a movie about the resilience of children. He has mentioned that many people will hate the film and many people will love the film. In the DVD version he notes that he is 64 years old now and it took this long for him to find his own inner child. He ends the intro by thanking the audience (three times in a row!) for watching this film and it makes all the difference if you watch this plea before watching the actual movie, which can be quite a shocking experience if viewed mentally unprepared.
I saw Pan’s Labyrinth and read The Life of Pi last year. Tideland has a rather similar concept. It is not only about resilience of children, but also about innocence, which seem to go hand in hand in this beautiful, magical and yet very unsettling work.
A few days ago I spotted a poster for Levi’s “Road trip from the Original” club tour featuring Felix Da Housecat. The poster was at a huge local store specializing in water pipes and hydrophonic cultivation systems. The original venue was a small artsy joint called Loft 16, but they had to relocate to a bigger space apparently because they had pre-sold too many tickets. The new venue turned out to be the prestigious Zeiss Planetarium right by one of Vienna’s landmarks, the giant ferris wheel at Prater.
His style has been classified with terms such as Neo-Electro and Left-Field House
Left-field house producers tend to ignore at least one major chapter of the traditional deep-house production playbook, whether doing away with the 4/4 rhythmic structure, the need for hand percussion, or the emphasis on the beat. If the deviation in the production can’t be pinned down to a specific quality, there remains something certifiably askew. There’s no single sound that typifies left-field house. It can be abstract and grimy like Theo Parrish, whose productions often favor low BPMs and samples from obscure jazz recordings, all the while retaining a pronounced 4/4 rhythm. It can come from house’s back door, through post-disco R&B and Italo disco influences, like Metro Area — a duo who regularly bypasses the relentless 4/4 thump completely. Or it can be equally experimental and contemporary like Herbert, whose concepts and methodologies (sampling sources that range from kitchen utensils to biological functions) occasionally overshadow his accomplishments.
Well, I’ve been a fan of the Housecat for several years now and I just knew that I couldn’t forgive myself if I let this opportunity pass. I wasn’t sure when he would start his set, so I showed up early at 11 pm. There was some trouble with the dryness of eyes at the home base, so I was clubbing solo this time. The location was very atmospheric (no pun intended) and there was even a spacious garden with beach chairs and all. I chit chatted with the locals and met someone who had cured his impending tinnitus with some type of ultra low frequency sound therapy. I decided to find out more about that even though I haven’t problems with tinnitus yet. As far as I could tell, I was the only person among about a thousand clubbers wearing ear plugs! The sound system was pumping a steady bass line at about at least 110 db, so it is practically certain that some of the speaker hugging crowd will have some high frequency hearing loss and/or tinnitus in the decades to come. Don’t lose the music, my friends.
After one or two Vodka Smirnoffs and an energetic show by the French Cassius, I decided to chill out the actual planetarium while waiting for the DJ set to start. According to their web site, the planetarium is one of the most advanced ones in the world (aren’t they all). I can’t remember if I’ve been to one earlier, but I found the huge revolving optical Zeiss “Universium” projector a very intriguing device by itself. The projected stars were visibly vibrating to the bass line of the music. I observed this interesting phenomen on the comfy seats for hours before returning to the main hall to find out that it had been invaded by literally hundreds of clubbers. There was no need for smoke machine since around here people will smoke their cancer butts just about anywhere no matter what the signs or laws dictate. They must have some sort of built-in reflex to avoid cigarette burns in other people and their clothes even in extremely crowded situations. Unfortunately there was almost no room to dance at all and dancing was mostly about maintaining your own 200 square centimeters of floor space with your feet while rhythmically shaking your hands at various directions to ward of the bottle wielding floor space invaders.
Well, soon after the Cassius act, they announced “DJ Felix da Housecat” and his instantly recognizable envelope twitching, aggressive and dirty Chicago house sound started flowing. I slowly worked my way closer to the DJ table over the course of an hour or so and finally saw the master of the wheels of steel himself. He was totally grooving to his own sonic creation in his little Pioneer/Apple branded techno altar and so was the crowd. I don’t know if it was the limited space or just the general politiness of austrians, but I didn’t see too much wild and out of control dancing. The club scene in Berlin for example is generally much wilder and expressive. The VJ work was stupendously dull and uncreative, but there were pleasant whiffs of herbal aroma in the air and the music was also pulsating and vibrating in a most enjoyable manner. I really like his style with the use of vocal samples and the seemingly endless variations with envelope modulations. There is no doubt in my mind that mixing music and sounds with this degree of proficiency is no less admirable than the work of master concert violinist for example.
Just listen to the “Buy Now For Sale” sample on his myspace page to get an idea what I am talking about. This is the kind of music that only works like it’s intended if you have the dynamics of a big sound system and a roomful of people jumping up and down to it. Isolated from it’s context, hearing it by itself on a small computer speaker it sounds like broken record player, but at the planetarium it felt like the universe itself was shaking.
I didn’t have the camera with me so I had to borrow the picture above from a Mysteryland 2005 gig. He is still wearing a similar t-shirt, shades and earphones and looked pretty much the same last night. He had a bright yellow helmet with a big number 3 on it as a type of an amulet or idol on the mixing table. A female member of the crowd had apparently placed blue panties on it and this caused much amusement among the technical crew and the DJ himself.
To conclude this slightly incoherent and rambling entry with even more irrelevant trivia, I’ll remind you about another type of musical event that is approaching with great inevitability. The Eurovision song contest is held in Helsinki on the 12th of May. For once they have managed to pull together a decent web site to showcase the host city. Check out www.helsinkihostcity.fi. I can’t comprehend why they haven’t been able to produce a tourism promotion web site of this quality before the excuse of this contest. Budgetary reasons perhaps. Anyway, two thumbs up for the creative use of photographs and soundtrack.
On Saturday the local audiovisual oasis for film addicts, über cool Alphaville, hosted an excellent 10 year anniversary party at the Gartenbau Kino. Unfortunately I’ve had a streak of bad luck and I’ve managed to break down both my iBook and the brand new ceramic inlay which I had inserted on my first molar about a year ago in Bangkok. I’m heading over to Hungary as a dental tourist to have the inlay fixed and hopefully get a new logic board for the iBook later this week.
Anyway, I missed some of the earlier shows at the party while I was arranging my travel schedule. I did make it to the gala premiere of Life in Loops which is a remix of fresh footage, music by Sofa Surfers and raw footage from another film called Megacities. I especially liked the New York hustler and crack dealer sequences and the dyestuff man in India:
Timo Novotny labels his new project an experimental music documentary film, in a remix of the celebrated film Megacities (1997), a visually refined essay on the hidden faces of several world “megacities” by leading Austrian documentarist Michael Glawogger. Novotny complements 30% of material taken straight from the film (and re-edited) with 70% as yet unseen footage in which he blends original shots unused by Glawogger with his own sequences (shot by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) from Tokyo. Alongside the Japanese metropolis, Life in Loops takes us right into the atmosphere of Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Bombay. This electrifying combination of fascinating film images and an equally compelling soundtrack from Sofa Surfers sets us off on a stunning audiovisual adventure across the continents. The film also makes an original contribution to the discussion on new trends in documentary filmmaking.
After the premiere we headed to the pavillion in Stadtpark and bumped into two finns who were on a day trip from Budapest where they were studying to become hotel professionals. They had interesting stories to tell about their work. An older gentleman comes to the hotel with a different young lady several times a week and then visits the same hotel on a Sunday brunch with his family.
After midnight I ended up sitting almost next to one of my musical heroes, B. Fleischmann, while he was busy with his laptop mixing a new soundtrack to an old Buster Keaton movie. The movie was mostly about the american civil war and steam engines. The soundtrack was superbly minimalistic true to his inimitable style and he sipped a well deserved beer after the credits.
I’m off to Innsbruck next weekend. I’ll probably visit the Stubai Glacier to do some summer snowboarding to get some sun and shake off the bad vibes about stuff breaking down around (and in) me.
The all healing Summer is finally arriving and the sun is shining with it’s wondrous warmth and unrestrained luminosity. Take care, brothers and sisters… and remember to enjoy what life and mother earth have in store for you!
