Aural Pleasures
Sil van der Woerd’s Music Videos
Dutch filmmaker Sil Van Der Woerd makes beautiful, surreal, and extremely impressive music videos on unbelievably tiny budgets. These videos contrast industrial, futuristic, black and sterile environments with the soft beauty and grace of the subjects, and historically inspired fashions.
Check out his videos for Lolly Jane Blue’s “Worms” and “White Swan”:
Tags: industrial landscapes, music videos, queens, sil van der woerd, surreal, swan
Zoe Keating’s “Into the Trees”
I’ve been listening to famed cellist Zoe Keating’s new album, Into the Trees, which is streaming for free up on her site here. It’s wonderful. I can’t ever really listen to instrumental music for that long, because I’m more held by and drawn to rock songs with typical structure and vocals and that’s just how my brain works, but as far as all-instrumental albums go, this one is pretty awesome. It goes all over the place like good cello should, it’s deep and rich and sonorous and adventurous, it rolls from frenetic to melancholy and back over and over. I first heard of Zoe Keating’s work when she was a band member of Rasputina; Raspy almost singlehandedly inspired my love of the cello.
I read the interview with Zoe Keating in (the current) Issue 5 of Coilhouse Magazine, and it was pretty interesting. Zoe details her self-publishing of all of her music and how getting a big record deal is maybe obsolete in this electronic age, when she gets $.70 from each iTunes sale and major record companies that once rejected her as too much of a risk are now asking after her, offering a “good deal” – half the profits. As she says, “Yeah, right.”
Tags: cello, coilhouse, rasputina, zoe keating
Syn Emergence: A Short Film Experiment in Animation/Sound
This is really interesting and needs to be seen. A visual/aural trip. It’s kind of how I visualize the creation of the universe – and also, somehow, oddly, the neural connections made in a brain.Tags: animations, short films, space, trippy
Exquisite Torture: Angelspit’s New Album, “Hideous and Perfect”
Check out this interview with Angelspit from ReGen Mag:
The Beauty of Perverted SoundHere’s an excerpt I particularly like, explaining Destroyx’s image for the album artwork:
Visually, you once more set up a whole new appearance. Destroyx this time spreads a kind of geisha vibe, in connection with erotic and doll-like imagery. What’s the background for the current visual concept, and how does it relate to the lyrics?
Destroyx: For our previous albums, we have often looked towards history for our visual concepts. This time we decided to do something fresh and completely new….I worked with an extremely talented makeup artist, Karen Hopwood, to develop the makeup look. The outcome is something edgy and quite horrific, yet also strangely alluring. The overall look is quite alien, a weird mix of fetish fashion and screwed-up geisha makeup. The makeup is a mask which covers my recognizable facial features, thus contorting my identity. Most responses to the makeup have been very interesting. Many people have been confused and disturbed by it, which is definitely the intended outcome. I’m not trying to look glamorous, as many people do for their promotional looks. I guess I’m still trying to get people to readdress their attitudes towards beauty, which is always an ongoing theme. Through presenting highly polished, almost hyperreal imagery, we are attempting in a way to use the language of advertising that we are so constantly bombarded with in society. However, we are subverting the message in a disturbing way. People seem to be repulsed and confused by the message, which is our intention. It’s meant to be an alluring yet terrifying image; it’s basically Hideous and Perfect.
“Destroyx is a typical girl who has a fetish for shoes; I’m a typical boy who is a junkie for old synthesizers.”
- ZooG
