The other night my daughter gave me back a sliver of the edge I thought I’d lost, by stomping downstairs and demanding that I turn this down:

…From back in the day when shooting a music video meant daft dancing, graffiti and lots of crash zooms. Tonight I’m showing a little selection of early 90s videos as part of an Eastside knees-up at VIVID called Cakeology, also featuring such Birmingham luminaries as DJ Gershwin and Jock Lee. And if you’re sauntering through the rag market in search of an adapter or some sari fabric this weekend, bear in mind that twenty years ago the place looked like this.

You might remember Danish troupe Efterklang from a joyous set at Supersonic last year. They’re returning to Birmingham next week, to play at new venue Asylum in Hockley. It’s just over the road from where Bonds used to be (home of Moneypenny’s, Boogie Down Brum and most importantly Oscillate) in an oft-ignored corner of Birmingham (by me anyway) which seems to livening up with student influx and pubs like the Lord Clifden.

Efterklang – Cutting Ice To Snow from Rumraket on Vimeo.

(The promo for Illuminant is great too)

Also coming up in Birmingham, one of the founders of Paris film collective Light Cone will be presenting a selection of work at Vivid on Saturday. And much further away, the Full of Noise festival in Barrow-in-Furness looks worth a visit.

Some nice puppetry action in Ben Lister’s latest video:

Lisa Li-Lund ‘Bloodface’ from ben Lister on Vimeo.

PS: Birmingham band KateGoes need an audience of sock-monkeys for their next video. If you’d like to contribute check out this handy youtube guide.

Cardboard dog on keyboards. 3 minutes of joy.
Better version here, via antville.

Ordinarily this thread marks the passing of forgotten legends or cult heroes and it seems a little flippant to include a 33 year-old in ‘Obituary Corner’. But this is the kind of thing that won’t get a mention in the papers, and we thought it should be noted here. A four-man operation that grew out of college in Kent, Shynola were a big factor in getting us and many others excited about animation and music videos 7 or 8 years ago and Gideon Baws was central to the group. He died from a virus on 11th October. There’s more at antville and Creative Review and below is one of Shynola’s finest moments, their Lambchop video.

Just following up from the dvd launch; anyone who wants to pick up ‘Shadow Shows of the Phantascope’ can do so at the new Pram Shop.

Ps: Pram are doing a couple of gigs in Canada this month – readers in Montreal or Toronto are advised to go and track them down. [myspace]

Please be standing for Mr Bruce Conner, artist, founder member of the ‘Rat Bastard Protective Society’ and an inadvertant pioneer of the music video. A man who made speeches entirely composed of dessert names, and handed out badges labelled I Am Bruce Conner. A lot of his film work was assembled from old industrial shorts and B-movie offcuts, and until now we mainly thought of him as the guy that did Mongoloid (pictured, a cut-up classic from 1978 presented as “a documentary film exploring the manner in which a determined young man overcame a basic mental defect and became a useful member of society.”) Since he died on 7th July further digging has revealed plenty more of interest, particularly an even earlier proto pop-video called Breakaway (1966) featuring Toni Basil (of ‘Mickey’ fame, and she who choreographed ‘Once in a Lifetime’). Although much of his work was made up of other people’s footage Conner was extremely protective of his copyright, and we wouldn’t want to make him posthumously cross by embedding his films here. But you can see Breakaway in pixillated form on Google Video, and read about it at Senses of Cinema.

Have been feeling slightly out of touch with the music video world lately, but programming for Supersonic is always a good opportunity to catch up with this stuff. Winging its way to us via special delivery at this moment (hopefully to arrive in time for Saturday) is a dvd of new Cornelius animations, amazing stop-motion and cgi work by a filmmaker called Koichiro Tsujikawa. Cornelius are already well known for their visuals, but this guy takes the biscuit – particularly his slow-building and insanely-detailed Brueghel-meets-model-railway number for Like a Rolling Stone. (The Sensuous dvd is released in September by Cherry Red.) Other stuff we’re excited to be showing… a couple of videos by San Francisco outfit Encyclopedia Pictura including their recent Bjork extravaganza (though not in old-school 3D unfortunately); crazy dead fish antics from Warp; and Matt Stokes’ distillation/recreation of the classic Northern Soul night out in Long After Tonight. Plus on Sunday Matthew Eaton and Grandmaster Gareth will be performing their new score to Murnau’s Nosferatu.

Going back to music videos — if you have any interest in the form, Antville Videos is still the best place to go on the web. On the whole it’s just people posting promos, dissing them, bigging them up. But there’s also some interesting industry chat in there too, like this thread on the shrinking-budget phenomenon. They also alerted us to an article on Michel Gondry’s 25 favourite-est music videos. And in the process of fetching those links let me know that Bruce Conner had died. Oh shit. Obituary corner coming soon…

This video for ‘Florida’ by Diplo was made by Brum director Ben Lister with Warblefly productions in the wild woods of Warwickshire. We’ve added it to our pixilation collection, and will be showing it nice and big on Sunday evening.

(More info/higher res fillum here, and although I’m getting a bit tired of all this interweb pop idol nonsense you can vote for the video in the animation section of the Clipstar awards.)

**Update** – we’ve taken the flash player off because it was messing with some people’s browsers. Go see it here instead, or on the Radar site…