About Juice

Juice is Inksie’s experimental podcast. It’s a mix of electronic and analog sounds, with both ambient and lyrical songs that create a cohesive listening experience. The Inksie Team curates and mixes Juice (semi) monthly and commissions custom artwork.

Track Listing

About the Tracks

Inksie’s Creative Director, Dave, selected and organized Juice 002’s songs. He writes:

I ran across the B. Fleischmann & Ms. John Soda a couple of years ago. The intro resonated with me, so I decided to start the playlist out with it. I tested the waters with iTunes Genius and began researching suggested artists’ work, sometimes to a second or third degree. A few of the other artists were some old favorites of mine including The Radio Dept., Dntel and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. They seemed to fit in well with the other tracks, so I fit them into the mix where they flowed the best.

I’ve learned quite a bit in organizing this playlist. Please give this month’s Juice a listen and let me know what you think.

About the Artwork

The artwork for Juice’s second edition was created by the Inksie Team’s Creative Division. It was inspired by the fifth track, Eyes on Fire by Blue Foundation. The song’s quiet, haunting lyrics provoked a powerful mental image:

Eyes on fire

Your spine is ablaze

Felling any foe with my gaze

The idea was developed through several sketches that evolved into the icon. A vector version of the icon was developed for texture work. It was printed on a low-quality laser printer with cheap, course paper. The Inksie Team spent several minutes harassing the ink from the paper’s fibers with Bic pen-ends and fingernails, giving it a fatigued appearance. It was scanned and colorized using Photoshop.

Your degree is in graphic design; traditionally, most people would associate this with print/web design. I have seen some prints you have made, but it seems that film dominates the work found in your portfolio. What initially sparked your interest in film and how long have you been actively creating films?

I almost failed my penultimate year at art school. I didn’t have a great love for creating typography or layout although I’ll always have an admiration for the work of others who do it well. I asked my tutors (Steve Rigley & Jo Petty) if I could go off on my own and try some video experimentation. Luckily, they welcomed the idea and I haven’t opened InDesign since. That was in 2008, the same year that I created the Radiohead video. I owe a lot of thanks to Steve & Jo at GSA for allowing me to take that risk.

What inspired you to create Big Ideas (don’t get any), and what exactly did the conceptual process entail?

It was never intended to be a Radiohead project. Dr. Roland Shregle from Ganjatron.net wrote a tutorial back in the dark ages of the Internet on how to replace a default sound file that’s inside every HP scanner. The original file is Fur Elise and was intended as an Easter egg for early technology enthusiasts. I couldn’t help but notice the excellent bass sound and so the next logical step was to find other instruments that would accompany my bassist. Look Around You probably inspired the final treatment.

I was watching a lot of old vintage YouTube videos that had ‘psychic mediums’ apparently demonstrating supernatural abilities. I wanted to create a video which shows that science and hard work can be just as impressive as fraudulent trickery. I had been sitting on the concept for two years, but couldn’t write any decent music. When In Rainbows was released, I found myself inspired again and decided that Nude worked perfectly.

Has Radiohead contacted you about it? What did they think?

Colin left a nice post on their blog. He called it “brilliant” which is very flattering. I’ve followed their music since my school days and value their work a lot. It was a surreal experience to find out that they had watched and liked it.

What camera did you film it on?

A really crap Sony consumer HD SR-8 camcorder. It’s all I had but it worked. A lot of time and effort was spent on perfecting the overall grade trying to make pixels look like film. I wanted the camera to be from the same era as all these forgotten objects with only the actual music being contemporary. A key theme is that they’re all crying out for attention, trying to prove themselves still worthy of existence in order to avoid the inevitable landfill. According to online feedback it made a few people quite emotional so it looks like the characterisation of inanimate objects was a success. Props to Paul Rand for advising to defamiliarise the ordinary.

Where did you find all of the hardware that was used, were you looking for specific models to create the right sounds?

One man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure. The scanner was bought on eBay (as it had to be the particular model that Roland Shregle outlined) The ZX Spectrum was in the family, although I eventually used a different model for the audio (long grey one a +48k, also in the family.) It sounds much better but isn’t as visually recognisable as the small black Spectrum you see onscreen. A guy on an old mailing list actually noticed the difference in the beeps. Haha. If you feed the first minute of audio into your Spectrum at home, then your computer will play alongside my video. Thanks to Andrew Bruin for giving me the old Epson printer and my friend Daniel Glennie for lending me his oscilloscope. The problem I had with the Spectrums is that the viewer doesn’t have any visual feedback between the computer and the audio. So I wired it up to Daniel’s oscilloscope in order to get a visual representation of the audio. Thanks to Emma Keogh for the Granada Finlandia TV.

How long did the setup take?

I spent a full weekend alone in a studio filming it but had to throw all the footage away as I was plagued with sync issues. It was a very low-budget project so even transporting all the equipment to the studio was a huge problem. I took a few days off then tackled the studio again. This time I only needed a few hours and everything worked perfectly. You wouldn’t have seen the video if it hadn’t worked that day, as I graduated the same week. I had degree show stresses and honestly thought I was wasting my time making computers make noise. The online reception gave me a huge confidence in my work, and I’d like to thank everybody who offered their support. It really meant a lot to me.

Since college – it appears you’ve directed a number of music videos, was this your original goal or has it grown into an interest after you started school?

It was through necessity. The upside of the digital era we’re in is that a lot of skills are portable to different industries. I find it hard to tell people what I do for a living other than “make videos”. I’d like to call myself a director, although those projects are only recently becoming more frequent. Art school gave me an essential understanding of the importance of a solid concept. Everything else can be picked up.

Is there any specific influence for the aesthetic found in most of your films?

I found out early on that it’s effective to use nostalgia to stir up emotion. It’s the same gimmick that Hollywood is using to cash in on all of the re-makes of franchises we love from our childhood. A lot of my personal work reflects the past as I’ve often thought that we took a wrong turn somewhere in the late Eighties. I have tried to treat each commercial project as a unique piece of work and not get bogged down into a distinct aesthetic while keeping my inner-artist content with personal projects.

Your Frightened Rabbit music video feels quite a bit different than your others. Is there any specific reason for this?

There are two sides to the stuff I do. When I create work for myself, I’m in complete control and only finish when I want to show the world. The Frightened Rabbit video was a lot of fun and I really like the band. It was a commercial project to pay the bills.

What is the idea behind the flashlights in the crowd?

We only had £600 (including my fee) to make the entire video. To avoid spending money on lighting I asked all of the unpaid extras (Frightened Rabbit fans found on Twitter) to bring flashlights. I think it worked well considering the limitations of the shoot and helps strengthen the nautical/submerged/sinking theme. I’d love to do a decent-budget video for them as I think that they’re the most refreshing band to come out of Scotland in recent years. They deserve a huge international financial backing.

Do you have much time for personal projects? If so, are you currently working on anything?

I’m a very lucky person. The Scottish Art Council recently awarded me their 2010 film fund. I’ve been given a budget to create a new “major piece of motion graphics” and have been working on it almost exclusively since January. It’s a film about a magician who is in love with a video-game simulation of his dead wife. He has a moral struggle between self-delusion and being honest with reality. It’s based on some research I did while writing my dissertation, I’d secretly record Glasgow psychic mediums giving “readings” to members of their spiritualist congregation. It’s really exploitative stuff. My film won’t be as direct, as I’m using the metaphorical world of video games to tell my story. The Daily Mail [Fox News of the UK] didn’t understand my concept and wrote about the film here.

About Juice

Juice is Inksie’s experimental podcast of the latest and hottest tracks. It’s a mix of electronic and analog sounds, with both ambient and lyrical songs that create a cohesive listening experience. The Inksie Creative Board curates and mixes Juice monthly and commissions custom artwork.

Colorcubic created the artwork for the first installment of Juice. The three-dimensional rendered juice box takes its inspiration from Polish poster designers and the name of Inksie’s podcast, “Juice.”

Track Listings

The Brazillian studio, 3bits has re-imagined the history of contemporary electronic with Sync/lost. An installation piece brought to life by two projectors and three subjects armed with Wii-motes and headphones. It guides them through the formation and evolution of prolific electronic genres as well as their sub-genre counterparts.

In developing this installation, their stated intentions:

The project’s objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback. The choice is individual and leads to a collective consequence in the spatial visualization of information.

When the user selects a genre it will play a popular song from it and provide expository information regarding the sound under the “Now Playing” yellow bar at the right hand of the projection. This element adds a new dimension to the interface. Instead of just seeing the past and future of specific sounds, the text outlines the pertinent information attributed to each sound.

In the spirit of Sync/lost, a tool for sifting and sorting through the past. 3bits referenced the origins of electronic music through the author Ferruccio Busoni, a pioneer of the genre. In 1911, he published his book Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music where he writes:

…[Dr. Thaddeus Cahill] has constructed a comprehensive apparatus which makes it possible to transform an electric current into a fixed and mathematically exact number of vibrations. As pitch depends on the number of vibrations, and the apparatus may be “set” on any number desired, the infinite gradation of the octave may be accomplished by merely moving a lever corresponding to the pointer of a quadrant. Only a long and careful series of experiments, and a continued training of the ear, can render this unfamiliar material approachable and plastic for the coming generation, and for Art

What Busoni has to say is entirely relevant to the concept of Sync/lost. It allows the user to direct the Wii-mote’s virtual cursor over a genre and displays what it was influenced by and what other movements it influenced through a web of lines. The influencing node is denoted as the “parent” knot and the influenced node is a “child” knot. The installation enables people to observe and easily understand a musical evolution, potentially developing an appreciation for electronic music as a whole.

Vincent Moon has been producing an exquisite series of videos for three years now called “Take Away Shows” on his site also known as La Blogotheque. These caught my interest late last year and I’ve watched through almost all of them (I believe there are over 100 now). Most of these are indie-esque bands and are shot in locations all over the world. I had forgotten about this series of films until today when I noticed a post on Pitchfork about Phoenix (a magnificent French electronic-indie-rock-etc.-etc. band). I was really excited since I have been really into the band lately and that this filmmaker has finally put together some films featuring them.

These videos rarely cease to give me chills when I watch them. There is something almost ethereal about them. A lot of it is due to the fantastic filmic quality with overly warm tones, a slight glow, and a grainy feel. I really enjoy the shots of the band in between their performances and seeing them interact, I’ve never seen material like that. The films give you the feeling like you’re actually there watching the band live, while in a very small personal setting. You can see the bands having fun and some even get a bit embarrassed of the attention in these awkward live settings. There is a downright sense of immediacy, the bands can’t master their tracks in a sound proofed studio, or add to the audio in any other way than its original form of capture. It’s completely up to them to prove the raw power of their voices.

This is a fantastic example of objective camera (defined as: When the scene is shot from the viewpoint of a spectator watching from outside the scene). It’s shot in the first person, as if someone were to be there, walking along with the band as the perform. To accomplish this successfully with one’s own style is much more difficult than you would assume. The art of handheld camera work has been very controversial over the past decade. Ever since the Blair Witch Project came out, people have been bashing movies and TV shows left and right for “shaky camera”. While this has some basis and I really do believe that it has been overdone in some arenas, I think that some filmmakers are really working past this negative stereotype successfully (such as Vincent Moon). The fact that VM is able to capture these beautiful images in one shot is equally as impressive as the successful handheld camera work. Most people that aren’t involved with film even know how difficult they are. I don’t even want to think about how long these walking shots took to coordinate seeing as he’s walking backwards the majority of the time, he’d better have someone clearing his path!

You should definitely check out the rest of his films. In fact, I suggest you waste the rest of your day getting lost in them. He has some fantastic web designers, so if you lose interest in the videos at least you’ll have something else wonderful to look at. Temporary Areas is his non-profit production company, Les Nuits de Fuimes Vincent Moon’s personal blog.