VARIOUS ARTISTS
DIN AV 01/04/CN/86.03
DVDSC01
DVD
DVDScape 2004

~Scape is Stefan Betke’s Berlin-based label with a fine roster of artists including Jan Jelinek, Triosk, Burnt Friedman and Betke’s own Pole project. In its relatively short history it’s also been responsible for four state-of-the-genre Staeditzism compilations. Now comes the label’s first DVD which presents six audio-visual collaborations, a video of Pole live, three screensavers and an interview with Betke. DVDs are a fairly recent addition to record company merchandising options, but given the financial tribulations averred by the big labels, they’re keen to exploit any and all revenue streams possible. That’s the sceptic’s view and it’s one soundly belied by dvdscape01.

Jan Jelinek delivers the first track: a paranoia-inflected piece of spookiness familiar from his most recent solo release La Nouvelle Pauvreté. It would make an ideal spy movie soundtrack, every glitch a potential phone tap and its visuals present blocky deconstructions of an architect's model. Rechenzentrum's video is self-produced. It's an abstract affair redolent of spectrographs and the sort of interference suffered by cathode ray tubes menaced by magnets. 5 minutes in and the familiar sound of Hal's voice from 2001 A Space Odyssey, begins its doomed soliloquy. Although almost too familiar, the accompanying music and visuals ensure that the sum impression is nearly as satisfyingly unsettling as the first time it’s encountered in 2001 A Space Odyssey. In fact it serves as an effective translation of the experience from film onto the dance floor.

Christian Kleine’s Filmtitel Einkleben exhibits an advanced case of schizophrenia: one part succeeds another and each appears to have been recorded by an entirely different group. Starting out as what could be a vampire film soundtrack, it progresses into abstract glitch territory then switches suddenly into warm, nostalgic guitar pop and so on through a number of further episodes. It’s an interesting piece of music whose charms are amplified tenfold by Jutojo's visual accompaniment. It’s difficult to use the rather shopworn term ‘video’ for the collage of brief snippets of light, shadow and memory assembled into gorgeous, flickering patterns. Media collective Jutojo (who are also responsible for the design of Jazzanova’s In Between) deserve an award for producing a piece of work so resonantly beautiful. It’s worth the price of admission on its own.

Dimbiman’s Squirrel Attack might be described as psycho-house, its beats seeming to be speeding ahead of meter ever so slightly. Jorg Franzmann’s visuals try to play games with the viewer's mind by unsettling their sensibilities. Great fun! Given the vocals on Safety Scissors’ track, it would have been all too easy to deliver a standard, mime/dance routine. Thankfully the vigorous, arcade game techno is given the abstract treatment by Umatic. Moderat’s 6-Minute-Terrine certainly gets the ticket for most humourous video by doing just what it says on the tin, in high style.

The interview with Stefan Betke is conducted in between snippets of a live show with an unnamed rapper (presumably Fat Jon). There’s an irony – either deliberate or unfortunate – that Betke declares ‘At most places video is still treated as an also-ran. A nice spin-off, pretty, colourful flickers and it does not matter which particular image is being shown…’ whilst throughout the interview appear just the sort of pretty, but rather meaningless shapes which he appears to be criticising. This is the problem with abstract visuals: seen in isolation it’s difficult to interpret them as anything other than eye candy. For a visual language to gain credence it is likely to benefit from wider exposure – an example of which is D-Fuse’s D-Tonate_00 which presented a predominantly unified visual style over a range of videos by exploring a 3-dimensional cyberspace metaphor. A number of other factors make the production of high quality music visuals problematic. Firstly market/genre imperatives are defined by labels uninterested in anything except profit. Secondly the primacy of the musical over the visual results in the latter inherently playing the role of poor relation. Thirdly, what exactly does one do with a music DVD? One of the wonderful attributes of music is its portability and its experiential one-dimensionality – put into plain language, you can do the washing up or drive a car or make love while listening to music. Try doing any of those things while watching a music video and the result may be broken crockery, an early death or a failed relationship. Settle down on the sofa and watch a music DVD without a spliff or a drink and only the more figurative visuals with properly thought-through structures and resolutions make much sense.

None of the foregoing are insoluble problems, rather they pose interesting challenges and the composition of ~Scape’s DVD implies an awareness of some of these issues. It’s to the credit of the enterprise as a whole that at least some of these pieces remain in the memory, acting like art pieces to stimulate the senses and the intellect which prompts the desire to see them again and again.

Colin Buttimer

4/5

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Warp Vision: The Videos 1989-2004
WARPD122
DVD
Warp Records 2004

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Music is music is music. Or so Apple and Real and probably Microsoft would like to have the music-buying public believe. But what about the lyrics, the graphic design on the posters and the labels and the inlay cards and the tickets and in this case, rather more pertinently, the videos? At a time when the increasing popularity of the iTunes music store and its competitors appears to be gradually divorcing music from its visual elements, it’s good to be able to sample these pleasures in compilations like Warp Vision. There’s ample space for video to boost or warp (sorry) the experience of music. Of course video also has the much more frequently exploited potential to drag great music down to earth with dreadful, pretentious imagery or, perhaps worse still, tedious miming and/or bad acting. This is mostly absent from Warp’s DVD which appears in the same year as Ninja Tune’s Zen TV retrospective and ~Scape’s DIN AV DVD.

LFO’s eponymous 1990 track (which, rather marvellously, managed to reach number 12 in the UK charts) kicks things off. Its video comes on like a techno Jan Svankmajer, all stop-frame, fast-cut animation. Nightmares On Wax’s Aftermath from the following year features the artwork of a then unknown Jarvis Cocker who mixed surreal Easter Island-size heads with some serious dancing and related antics in the depths of a boiler-room. On was another chart entry and another memorable visualising by Cocker, which looks like a fusing of Salvador Dali and Mexican street art. It’s one of Aphex Twin’s gentler, more pastoral tracks and could well prompt an access of nostalgia on the part of slightly older viewers. After Sabres Of Paradise’s enjoyably off-kilter East End marching band meets beatz hybrid comes the label-defining work of Aphex Twin. It may be difficult to add anything new to what’s already been written about Chris Cunningham’s work, but it’s undeniable that he honed in on one of the key elements of Richard D. James’ work, namely the will to unsettle by twisting the commonplace and the pretty into something other. On Come To Daddy and Windowlicker, Cunningham punches into James’ chest and pulls his ID out for the audience’s delectation. In the freezeframe, the non-linear edit, the stutter and the blend are found effective visual analogues for the challenge of electronica’s dysfunctional ethos. These effects are further explored in the director’s cut version of Come To Daddy. Warp vision also includes the complete contents of the Gantz Graf DVD including Cunningham’s Second Bad Vilbel and Alex Rutterford’s painstaking 3D of rendering for the title track.

Warp Vision is not only the first Warp video compilation, it also effectively charts the label’s history from an early definitive take on UK techno (LFO and Nightmares On Wax) through to its popular peak (Autechre, Aphex and co) in the mid 90s and then on to its hit and miss diversification in the late 90s. The music of Beans and Anti-Pop Consortium in this latter period all too clearly fails to find the sort of effective visual accompaniment which graced their predecessors’ work – Beans’ miming in a snowy forest being a low point in imaginative musical envisioning. There’s also an inevitable feeling of déjà vu with the creative recycling of the Cunningham-esque wasp imitation trope for Chris Clark’s Gob Coitus and the playground rebellion of LFO’s Freak. To be fair, there are some charming exceptions including the delicious cartoon for Luke Vibert’s highly infectious I Love Acid, the blurred nostalgia/alienation of Ed Holdsworth’s video for Prefuse 73 and Mira Calix’s Little Numba by Sam Tootal (whose ideas are almost identical to Henrik Friberg’s videos on the Swedish electronica DVD, Collectanea).

It’s impossible to vouch for the interface, the package design or the extras as the promo copy of the DVD fails to supply any of these. Despite its occasional misses and the implied question mark hanging over the future direction of the label, Warp Vision is a cornucopia of visual and musical treats which proves to be essential viewing. Cheap at twice the price.

Colin Buttimer

4.5/5

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Solid Steel Presents Amon Tobin: Recorded Live
ZENCD90
Ninja Tune 2004
28 Tracks. 79mins37secs

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This album reaffirms my faith in Ninja Tune. The last decade has seen them corner the market in expressive and experimental electronic music. Recently, there have been signs of Ninja Fatigue with Mr Scruff’s increasingly self-indulgent super long sets, Wagon Christ’s latest overly fluffy offering and the fact that in always striving to be so completely eclectic they have ended up creating a distinct Ninja brand.

Solid Steel mixes showcase the cream of the Ninja crop. This time they’ve seized the opportunity to show what happens when you let one of the best DJ’s in the world run riot with FinalScratch, the most advanced piece of music making software known to man. The fourth installment in this series was recorded live at the end of an epic Australian tour when Amon was apparently ‘under the distracting influence of drugs, alcohol and Ozzy girls’.

This monster set is an A-Z tour of Tobin’s influences alongside a catalogue of his own work. Samplers, turntables and laptop are masterfully manipulated to produce some of the most messed up, scratched up, rhythmically driven music ever to meet your ears. His passion for drum and bass shines through with a skilful mix of classics old and new. Tunes such as Suspicious Circumstance’s Completely Real and T-Power’s Cuba are stripped down to their darkest forms with complex layers of hip hop, jazz, breaks and techno twisted over the top.

Tobin kicks off in classic Shadow cut and scratch style, ripping through a remix of fellow Ninja DJ Food's rocking funk drum track Dark Lady. From here on in he sets a relentless pace, moving deftly from the fractured post jungle beats of his awesome Verbal into the brain bending sounds of Aphex Twin's AFX. Darkness falls with the bass heavy beats of tunes like Cougar Merkin and Fear which burrow and wiggle their way into your brain.

This set takes us on a trip into Tobin’s weird sci-fi world populated by broken beat monsters. Light relief comes in the shape of his lush Night Life and set closer the Velvet Underground’s acid-soaked Venus In Furs, which draws the listener back from the inner recesses of their mind to reality.

This is a welcome change of direction for Solid Steel and a reminder of Ninja’s ability to push the boundaries of sonic possibility. The Silent Brazilian dazzles with his skills, building a sound that simultaneously shakes your brain, and destroys any preconceptions of what drum and bass should sound like. Although many of the tracks are remixes from his explosive Out From Outwhere album the material sounds fresh and confirms his status as master of the electronic form.

Serena Kutchinsky

3.5/5