The Sound-Image: Floating Points' Radiality

Sound and light are unique physical phenomena that tend to belie our direct tactile grasp. The ear perceives a sonic source of extended spatial distance, often of unknown source, by capturing and amplifying the vibratory waves in the air. The eye is perched at the heights of an Olympian mountain. This small organ of manifold layers might see things originating from enormous distances, even stretching time in looking millions of years into the past while gazing into the stars.

How might one touch the sharp brightness of the sun's radiation? In what way might one come to hold onto a melody that dissipates like a phantom a moment after being heard? Try to put into words the substantial quality of sound or an inkling of light's tactile sensibility.


Perhaps this refusal of strict objecthood is a reason why light and sound have both been associated with supernatural sources, and divine powers, throughout history. In Ancient Greek mythology, Prometheus robs fire from the gods and gives the gift to human beings. Take the invisible voice of a strange, omnipotent God booming awfully from the burning bush. Or further back, consider the immediate creative power of some great Being producing entities with his spoken words, stating in simple grammar for instance, "Let there be light."

Such meditations on sound and light arise from my viewing of a new Floating Points music video, Radiality, constructed under the direction of Hayden Bannochie & Alex Pissourios. Working from the title of the composition, the music video attempts to weave together a central converging point, a structural radius, where sound and image in a particularly modern context magnify sensual form.

In the beginning there was darkness. Darkness glides along melodic chords, opening its eyes into the static cut scene of an electricity tower looming over skeleton trees. A filtered burgundy orange air washes over the static. Our modern age is one of a proud Prometheus that grants us the force of electric fire to harvest the energy to warm our bodies.

The radius of such industrial fire is dynamic. It twists and turns with the rhythmic dissonance of a watery slap bass and piercing bolts of light that crash onto the screen like falling rain on a win shield. Brooding chords wither along zigzagging laser lines drenched in the smoggy haze of sunset. The electricity tower pulses synthesized swirls of burning drums, eventually broken down into its infrastructure-- the collaborating lines of twisting geometry-- bending into a vertigo of angles. Building in momentum dabbling computer signals work their way harmoniously into the dithering melody, rising and falling like spasmic breaths of air.

While sound travels in waves, light betrays such easy classification. In fact, light is the only physical phenomenon that can be measured as a wave or a particle, depending on the reflective stance of the observer. Perhaps such a dual physical make-up is what allows light to manipulate the sensual effect of music, informing the feel of vibration while making its invisibility more tangible.

In Radiality, Floating Points explores the physicality of the sonic and visual phenomena. Bass heavy synth wrangles the chest mirrored by the piercing quality of abrupt splashes of light that bother the eyes. However, the radiality of sonic-light also strives to reenchant our sterilized impressions of mechanical electricity and factory sound with the enigmatic immateriality that influenced the ancients to reflect on the supernatural. Grasping the infinite in such phantom-like phantasmagoria is an impressive, if not sublime feat.

Make sure to turn the sound UP when listening and make the screen as large as possible. This video demands full perceptual attunement.




Floating Points will release an album soon, stay tuned!

The Sound Image: Quasimoto's "Come on Feet"

Despite my pathologic habit of initiating a concept series and then never following up with a single successive post, the idea of the sound-image is too irresistible. So, a second post is in order, and what better candidate than Madlib's helium voiced alter-ego, Quasimoto, represented cordially by a florescent green puppet animal--slightly resembling a hideous faced possum--in the seminal underground release "Come on Feet". Madlib, born Otis Jackson Jr., dropped the single in 2000 on the original Quas album, "The Unseen", simultaneously rejuvenating and making a cemented name for Stonesthrow Records.

Saturated thoroughly with weed smoke and toad slimed mushrooms, Los Angeles' beat konducta par excellence Madlib ventures into the astrolands of the Hiphoposphere in his psychedelic exploration of the basic anatomical apparatus that keeps us moving around; our two feet.

Before we get to the acid trip puppet show video, let's break down some of the historical elements shaping the track's spacey quality. Giving "Come On Feet" a clamoring, other worldly feel, the running hypnotic melody cut from Alain Goraguer's psych-jazz soundtrack of Laloux's La Planete Sauvage shapes a dissonant, multi-textured soundscape. That's fitting considering Fantastic Planet is an animated epic story of a revolutionary battle between sensitive human and rational alien produced in 1973 but taking place in a temporal dimension far outside of our own. Madlib reaps crackling effects of stumbling footsteps and shadowy figures to construct a nocuous sound array that threatens to stir the most guarded corners of the listener's paranoia.

The vocal edits and samplings take their influence from another film of a more local, but equally mind bending, variety. Distorted clips chopped from Melvin Van Peeble's original 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweetback's Badasssss Song, surround Quas' raps dedicated to the prowess of his running legs. "Come on feet / cruise for me / ... Come on feet / Come on run." The listener is quickly gripped by the wrenching terror that overwhelms a fugitive escaping the authorities.

Surely inspired by the cinematic coherence between La Planete Sauvage's sound and image as well as Sweetback's song and visual landscape, Madlib pieces together the spacey liftedness with the terrestrial density of the urban jungle.

The unusual puppet animation employed (by some unknown art director) for the video of "Come on Feet" synthesizes the brooding sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement--consisting in both its airy and earthy forms--that permeates the sampled films. Sound and image lock together to produce deranged effects in the audience, most likely seated or standing still, interpolating monstrous feet as they loiter.



Just entertain your feet for a couple moments. Wiggle the toes. Slip your consciousness into the outer appendages. Imagine the inner motors of your mind beamed outwards from each protruding appendage. How monstrous and unsettling are they?


Question: Does anyone know the art director for the "Come on Feet" video?

Side note: "Feet" is a standard biblical euphemism for genitalia. Take, for example, Saint Jerome's description of a prostitute as "the harlot who opens her feet to everyone who passes by".

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?