Welcome to VISUAL STIMULI, a critical perspective on the eyeball-friendly side of music: the humble and oft-overlooked Music Video with MICHAEL PINCOTT. Now showing on your favoured televisual device or YouTube platform…

WATER CURSES – Animal Collective

Director: Andrew Kuo

The song: Gorgeous, masterful pop music from one of the most forward-thinking bands running around today. Deeply textured, very bright, quite unique and just great to listen to.

 The video: Pixels. Lots of square pixels. A constantly shifting picture is distorted by square pixels of various sizes, combining and separating rapidly, sometimes allowing some portions of untouched image through, but never enough to figure out what it’s actually supposed to be. A face perhaps? A body part? Who knows.

Stimulatory value? The shifting of the pixels really suits the bubbling, underwater tones of the song. It accurately conveys the feeling of constant, fluid motion which is what makes the song so good. While I would have enjoyed another narrative-based video like the creepy yet touching  Peacebone, the ever-shifting pixels work well in complementing the song. The way the pixels solidify into independent colours in the second half of the song is a nice touch, rather than being used wholly as a distortion in front of a larger picture. By the end of the video it’s difficult to tell what is meant to be image and what is independent of it, as deliberate shapes mingle with natural ones.

*** ½

^{CHECK OUT THE CLIP ON YOUTUBE}

A PICTURE OF OUR TORN UP PRAISE – Phosphorescent

Directors: Zachary Sluser & Matt Thiesen

The song: A simple, pretty song typical of the American folk scene, but with an added level of intimacy and otherworldliness.

The video: The quite tall and impressively bearded Phosphorescent is at his house, as various friends arrive with gifts of food. They all stand outside in the snow for a little while and there’s a slightly sad looking horse and some mysterious little red flags. They march on through the snow with the horse, Phosphorescent’s female companion sending him melancholy looks, before he and the horse go off on their own. Deep into the snowy night, Phosphorescent loads a shotgun. The horse looks none the wiser. But will he shoot the horse? That is the question that remains unanswered as the video fades to black.

Stimulatory value: An odd little narrative with the always fun mystery conclusion. There’s a sense of ritual to the video, as if it’s a normal sort of thing to have your friends over for some food and a bit of horse execution. The video certainly leads one to believe that the horse is doomed given all the sad looks from the female in the video, but then again, maybe he’s going squirrel hunting, or whatever it is that bearded people do over there with shotguns. It’s a gorgeously shot video with simple angles that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with anything, just leaving the viewer to contemplate the fate of the poor horse

****

^{CHECK OUT THE CLIP ON YOUTUBE}

MACHINE GUN – Portishead

Director: John Minton

The song: The reason the song is called Machine Gun is self evident from the digitized and distorted beat. Beth Gibbons provides her elegant vocals while Barrow and Utley give the song its edge.

The video: A very simple video. Generally videos that simply feature the band performing are quite dull and unimaginative, but this one is executed very well. The studio they perform in appears quite small and the band members are close together, enhancing the sense of witnessing an intimate performance.

Stimulatory value: The video is soaked in a gorgeous blue filter but is also quite dark, perfectly suitable given that Portishead is very much ‘night time music’. Emphasis is placed on the hitting of the electronic drum. It’s great to see Gibbons at the conclusion of the video getting into the hypnotic, riff-like beat of the song. The video is slightly pixelated, which one would normally account to watching it on the internet, but seeing the video in a higher quality reveals that it’s the video itself that is deliberately a little fuzzy around the edges.

***

^{CHECK OUT THE CLIP ON YOUTUBE}

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