This video is a collection of interviews with psychedelic trance artists during the 2011 OZORA Festival.
Summer is here and festival season is on.
This Year we two (maybe three) of the editors of the DPV will be hitting the OZORA, see you on the dance floor!
My Secret Heart is a music and film installation & performance commissioned by Streetwise Opera with music composed by Mira Calix and sound design by David Sheppard. Working with video artists Flat-e, we created a film to accompany the 48 minute performance, as well as versions for an installation and short film.
Streetwise Opera are a charity who use music as a tool to help people who have experienced homelessness move forward in their lives. They run a weekly music programme, resident in 10 homeless centres around the country – and also stage an annual production which gives their performers the chance to star in quality shows where there are high-expectations, no compromise and no patronising. The voices you hear in the music, and people you see in the film, are from Streetwise workshops around the UK. 100+ Streetwise performers also sang at the My Secret Heart premiere at the Royal Festival Hall in December 2008. My Secret Heart is about their story.
The film has an abstract narrative derived from individual conversations with each of the Streetwise performers. It is a direct emotional response to their stories combined with the haunting beauty of Mira Calix’s composition. Instead of focusing on a specific plot, the film embarks on a complex journey through various states of emotion, starting from pre-birth through birth, curiosity, exploration, excitement, playfulness; through to fear, anxiety and isolation. While it maintains a relatively dark and eerie mood overall, intertwined with the feelings of desperation are strong elements of hope.
The visuals were created primarily with custom software written with C++/openFrameworks, with some Quartz Composer elements, rendered AfterEffects sequences and live action footage. The custom C++ app is audio-reactive and user-interactive, allowing the visuals to be ‘performed’ live with full control over the behaviour of the virtual inhabitants of the cylindrical aquarium-like rig.
Tour information can be followed from myspace.com/mysecretheartuk
Here’s a little something from Vince Collins for the American Independence day, the day after tomorrow.
Tortov Roddle and his long-legged pig friend are having a really good time with some red berries.
[Thank you, Karo, for the suggestion!]
The Noel Fielding Luxury Comedy Series described on the Channel 4 website as “a psychedelic character based comedy show half filmed and half animated” is probably the best psychedelic comedy act to ever been screened on TV.
Give it a chance. You won’t be sorry 😉
(Link: Shanikoo. Thanks!)
Sometimes a trip feels like this looks. Somewhere between awe, looming terror, and plain confusion.
The Shadoks are kind of outer-space bird-like creatures designed and created by the French experimental animator Jacques Rouxel in the late sixties, in the spirit of newspapers comic strips like “Peanuts”. The Shadoks divided the French nation as much as the political debate about the future of democracy.
The Shadoks live on the shadok planet where everything is going wrong, and their efforts to escape to Earth are constantly foiled by rivals from another planet.
shadok cover These silly creatures with their own brand of logic first appeared on TV in 1968 and quickly became a cult. Their main mission was educative: criticism of the French society with absurd humor. The animated cartoon, revoiced by Kenneth Robinson (who replaced the French comedian Claude Piéplu), intrigued many a British child! Actually, the Shadoks used rules like:
* The more you fail, the more you have a chance that it will work in the end.
* Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping.
* If you have 999 chances in 1000 that the thing will fail, so hurry to do the 999 first tests, because the 1000th will probably be the right one.
* Why do simple when one can do complicated?
* In order for there to be the fewest discontent, one only has to always hit on the same ones…
* If there is no solution, it’s because there is no problem.
Spids Nøgenhat is Danish for the Liberty cap mushroom, which features prominently in the visuals.
