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[Premiere] Simian Mobile Disco's Retro-Futurist 'Hypnick Jerk' Music Video

Plus, an inside look at the analog instruments and visual systems that characterize the electronic duo's new album, "Whorl."

For new album Whorl (out today on Anti- Records), electronic music duo Simian Mobile Disco (SMD) wanted to limit their musical palette by building an analog modular system from scratch. Sonically, they were thinking of early electronic music—particularly Tangerine Dream and Krautrock—though musicians James Ford and Jas Shaw, who comprise SMD, wanted to impress their own signature on the sound. To top this off, the group recorded the album in real-time in front of an audience in California. Think of Whorl as Simian Mobile Disco's retro-futurist daydream.

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Before writing a single note of Whorl, SMD brought in frequent collaborators Hans Lo and Jack Featherstone to map out the project's visual territory. The directors of previous SMD videos, including the mesmerizing animated wonderland “Cerulean," they were tasked with building an analog visual system that ran parallel to the album—one with its own inherent limitations.

The result is an oscilloscope-based approach that generates forms, colors, and textures from bothanalog and digital signal paths. Indeed, Lo and Featherstone built an entire system with the express purpose of generating all of Whorl's visual elements, including music videos, album sleeve designs, and live projections.

As can be seen in the video for “Hypnick Jerk,” premiering here on The Creators Project, the visuals feature explosive flickers of color and pattern, all synced to the SMD sound. The overall effect is a highly synesthetic collision of past and present technology, with an eye to the future of sound and vision.

While the visuals might recall video artist Vincent Oliver's oscillscope-heavy work on musician Clark's Phosphor visuals, the two projects boast vastly different aesthetic outputs. Oliver's work is a monotone green, with distinct but evolving mathematical forms—Lo and Featherstone's visuals are multi-hued, multivalent, and much more abstract.

“Our brief for Hans and Jack was to make an instrument that would stretch them and be fun, but also be sort of out of their control,” explains Jas Shaw. “Like the music, there would be no definite end result.”

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For Ford, the oscilloscope “smelled of the '70s,” and paired well with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop-meets-Krautrock aesthetic SMD was after. On Whorl—which features synth textures that languidly unfurl, and dancier numbers that resist a time stamp—the production duo's arsenal was limited to two modular synthesizers, two sequencers, and a mixer. Every single sound on the record was made with this simple setup. Similarly, Lo and Featherstone's oscilloscope system relied on relative techno-simplicity.

Initial visual research was heavily focused on looking at analog visual synthesizers and testing their capabilities. Ultimately, the two were underwhelmed with video synthesizers of the past, which were also cost-prohibitive, so they moved on until they came across the classic Rutt Etra Video Synthesizer. Co-invented by Bill Etra and Steve Rutt in the '70s, Rutt/Ettra allows real-time video manipulation, resembling an ancient, scanline-based relative of today's amorphous, RGB+D Toolkit-made3D video textures.

While Rutt/Etra isn't truly reproducible in the digital realm (it's analog, after all), Lo and Featherstone thought they could emulate it with code and an oscilloscope. The upside, they told The Creators Project, is that their system didn't just spit out randomly generated imagery. Instead, they had a measure of control over the process, ensuring that their visuals would be tied to the “heart or text of the music.”

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To help achieve the Rutt/Etra-like effect, Lo and Featherstone's frequent collaborators, Artists & Engineers, built a special piece of software that would allow them to send content out of VDMX through a sound card and into the oscilloscope. In other words, using the oscilloscope's vector analysis, visual content would be turned into sound, then back into images.

For live performances, Lo and Featherstone deploy two laptops, their oscilloscope, a video camera, and projector. The first laptop is equipped with VDMX, and loaded with the duo's visual clips. Lo and Featherstone then mix the visual content through Artists & Engineers' software, inside which they can add effects. After sending the content through a sound card and into the oscilloscope, they then film the oscilloscope visuals and re-route that signal onto another laptop also running VDMX. Finally, they colorize the footage and add layers of other clips, all which appear behind Ford and Shaw as they bring audiences into SMD's blissful electronic daydream.

With Whorl's visuals, there is an interplay or friction between analog and digital as well as retro and future technologies. When juxtaposed with the footage Lo and Featherstone shot, we see a fusion of naturally-generated footage with animated 3D lines and shapes. “We wanted to create this retro-futuristic world,” said Featherstone. “There was this mysticism or feral mentality of going back to the elements. We wanted to capture things like forest, water, and air—these basic elements that we felt were very in line of where Simian wanted to take their music. Something almost spiritual.”

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Lo and Featherstone also drew on '60s and '70s psychedelic influences, ranging from the light shows of Single Wing Turquoise Bird and Joshua Light Show, as well as John Whitney and Oskar Fischinger's pioneering animation work. Ideally they wanted to visually express the “inner trip” of the music listening experience in all its kaleidoscopic splendor.

“We wanted to build our own visual world, an alternate reality,” Lo said. “And the oscilloscope makes it seem as though they we are 'scanning' this alternate world.”

For more on Simian Mobile Disco and to buy their new album, visit Anti Records' website.

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