I beleive EBN actually makes their songs using almost only
videotape sources, at least that's what they did originally. That is,
they took lots of tiny bits of video and repeatedly played them until it
seemed to make music. Their album is a natural extension of this. All
the video imagery you see in an EBN video is the actual source of the
sample you are hearing.
The Coldcut video brilliantly transcends this by using footage
which obviously has nothing to do with the sounds they are synched with.
I've always loved the way, in nature videos of insects, they seem to add
sound effects to the scene. For example, whenever they show an ant
nibbling off a bit of leaf you hear a little "crksh-crksh-crksh" sound
playing, as if they miked the ant or something like that (RDJ's
brownnosing Squarepusher liner notes notwithstanding). The individual
images in the Coldcut video seem *capable* of making the sounds they
coincide with, but they obviously are electronically generated or
musical in origin. Synching that beetle with the bass drum was ingenious
- it seems like an EBN video, like the beetle is the actual source of
the sound. The whole song/video becomes an artificial cacophony of
nature TV, while EBN is an apolitical cacophony of political TV.
-Chris Fahey
PS - Political TV used in art is so 80's though, isn't it?
quoted 24 lines -----Original Message-----> -----Original Message-----
> From: Adam J Weitzman
>
> Jon Drukman wrote:
>
> > the basic idea in "natural rhythm" has been done repeatedly by
> Emergency
> > Broadcast Network many times in the past... check out an EBN vid.
> (or get
> > their Telecommunication Breakdown CD which, apart from being
> produced by Jack
> > Dangers of Meat Beat Manifesto (making it a Must Own right there),
> has
> > several quicktime movies in the multimedia portion).
>
> I have the EBN videotape (the TVT one, not the band-produced original)
> and
> _TB_, and I love them both. I just think the execution on the Coldcut
> video
> was brilliant, better even than anything I have seen EBN do
> ("Electronic
> Behavior Control System" comes close, though).
>
> Adam J Weitzman