The Sound Image: Nick Uff's Vision of Portishead

Growing up in the 90's I never cared much for the MTV style music videos replaying like clockwork on the daily. The predictable narrative structure of a bunch of musicians singing to a camera that sporadically zipped through fifteen angles within a few seconds failed to add anything substantial to the music itself. I found it all pretty boring.

My stubborn distaste led me to some experimentations of my own with image and sound. I learned pretty quickly that smoking some herb and relaxing my back to twisted post-apocalyptic animation, while playing grinding spacey beats, could elevate the music listening experience to a subliminal state of wonder and transplant my body fully into a surreal absorption in the imagery. The audible and vision became one.

Since then I've trained myself to be able to reach that state of awe without any indulgence in drugs (although hallucinatory inspiration can't hurt). Many other experimenters in the sound image must be on the same page, because since then, I've noticed a lot of artists cultivating delicate skills to create films that explore the relationship between what is seen and what is heard.


I'd like to dedicate a new series in this crazy little blog to the videos that seamlessly intertwine music and image to produce the captivating inter-sensorial experience that as of yet lacks a codified description. Unfortunately, my linguistic baptizing skills escape me at the moment, so the preliminary concept shall be simply called the Sound Image. (suggestions anyone?)

We can start off this series with a couple relatively new films produced by Nick Uff for Portishead's groundbreaking third album after a ten year hiatus, fittingly titled Third. Mr. Uff's animation style harks back to the more traditional cartoonist method of hand drawing each frame. The jagged and looping lines of Uff's pencil sketches gives birth to his characters and landscapes while informing the scenery with a resonating sense of the artist's own emotional input.

Mr. Uff further adds to the raw texture that permeates the animation by shooting the frames entirely on 16mm. A buzzing choppiness scratches the surface, intensifying the movement of the camera's perspective that whizzes deeper and deeper into the ephemeral world that manifests itself.

The camera consistently falls into the eyes of a character, serving as the gateway into a new dimension of contour and filling that itself eventually dissipates into another world or spirals back to one previously seen but thereupon under the guise of a richer context. This collage strategy draws the viewer into an overlapping sphere of visual movement and vibration, concretely paralleling the formal structure of Portishead's music.

Mr. Uff describes his own creative process as consisting in a simple evolution of his first pencil stroke. An image comes to mind or the hand moves on the piece of paper, and the world begins to develop from the founding conception. "I don't storyboard my ideas, but let the films go where they take themselves. There's all sorts of ideas in there - things that have happened, a bit of social comment - like a stream of consciousness you could say."

In "The Rip", Beth Gibbons sings haunting stories of white horses rescuing her from the despair of lost love. The soft guitar matched by resounding keyboard melodies darkens Gibbons' introspective mood. Uff's animation brings out the horrific quality that emanates from Gibbons' voice through imagery of grotesque figures overwhelmed by the decadence of ghostly cityscapes.

Uff also plays with the ambiguous depiction of figures falling blindly to their deaths or flying joyously in the sky, ending abruptly with the song nearly suffocating on its tension. This embrace of the ambiguity by aggravating the tension seems to imply that artistic creation may sometimes lead to release and restoration, but at other times, it may intensify the feelings of suffering and loss that inspire it.



Portishead evokes a more desperate sentiment in the alarming synths of "We Carry On." The track increasingly builds towards a bass plucking tension that, once again, never gives. Uff's animation elaborates on just this tension by shifting violently between a broken love narrative, jungle-like urban landscapes that grow rampantly, and our disturbed voyeurism of shadow demons taking possession of humans.

The broken collage and focus on abundant decadence bring to mind the cutting geometrical structures and monocled prostitutes that give German Expressionist paintings a powerful sense of alienation and loss. Hope lingers slyly in the depths, but that pulsating tension constantly keeps us wondering; are we rising up or rising down?