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Posted by: gemma
on
30/06/09
Recently I have been working on amassing a few more visual goodies for our YouTube channel, unashamedly pandering to the perverse tendency of some to use the bandwidth-zapping video streams of YouTube as an on-demand radio station. (Have these people never heard of Last.fm?)
The latest uploads to go live are a couple of excerpts from the masterful VJ set that Dan Tombs delivered up to accompany Nathan Fake's live show at his Hard Islands launch party at Corsica Studios back in May. Unfortunately the video projector hired in for the evening wasn't quite up to the task and Dan's creations were almost lost in the feint mists of club time, but thankfully he also made a recording of his contributions that is too good to waste: so what you couldn't quite make out in the club, you can now watch on the internet. In keeping with the island theme of Nathan's new album, Dan's starting point was some footage from his own trip to Iceland (also one of Nathan's long-running obsessions, as I have mentioned here before); but particularly when refracted through his RGB-distorting prism, the feeling is that this magical landscape that we are navigating and observing is something much more alien than earthly, an effect not altogether dissimilar from that achieved in Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana.
As well as 'Hard Islands' album track Basic Mountain, Dan also kindly chopped out and uploaded the live version of You Are Here for us, partly because we particularly liked how the visuals turned out on that one, and partly as a handy illustration of the recent evolution of Nathan's sound. The success of Nathan's translation of the soothing, uplifting melodies of the original version of You Are Here into this meatier, beatier pounding dancefloor version is testament to the devastating power of his live show: to add some of that charge to your own DJ sets, turn to the flipside of the You Are Here single release for souped-up live versions of Drowning In A Sea Of Love tracks 'You Are Here' and 'Stops' tailormade for your turntables. And watch this space for more live footage of the Fake-quake to really ram my point home...
If you like what you see as much as we do, then you might be interested in booking Dan for a VJ set at your club (if so, you can contact him through his website); you may have already spotted his complementary visuals for old friend from art school Luke Abbott's live show, who first introduced us to fellow Norfolk resident (if not true Norfucker like Luke and Nathan) Dan. And you have most definitely also already come across Dan's photographic work, on the cover of Mr Fake's Hard Islands album (as well as the accompanying series of new press shots):
Taken at Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-borough, in authentic quirky Norfolk fashion) beach on the Norfolk coast, around 40 miles from where Nathan grew up, the breezeblock-and-lino cover image is the consequence not of urban neglect as one might assume, but of the voracious North Sea lapping at the coastal frontier of the British Isles, eroding cliffside communities as it goes. The dramatic destruction of the back cover shot places the front image in context (yet another reason why it is always worth tracking down the CD or vinyl!), capturing for posterity the level of erosion on one morning in December of last year. In the intervening six months since the sea has almost certainly already made even further inroads into removing those former clifftop residences - and that microwave will be long gone:
The latest uploads to go live are a couple of excerpts from the masterful VJ set that Dan Tombs delivered up to accompany Nathan Fake's live show at his Hard Islands launch party at Corsica Studios back in May. Unfortunately the video projector hired in for the evening wasn't quite up to the task and Dan's creations were almost lost in the feint mists of club time, but thankfully he also made a recording of his contributions that is too good to waste: so what you couldn't quite make out in the club, you can now watch on the internet. In keeping with the island theme of Nathan's new album, Dan's starting point was some footage from his own trip to Iceland (also one of Nathan's long-running obsessions, as I have mentioned here before); but particularly when refracted through his RGB-distorting prism, the feeling is that this magical landscape that we are navigating and observing is something much more alien than earthly, an effect not altogether dissimilar from that achieved in Werner Herzog's Fata Morgana.
As well as 'Hard Islands' album track Basic Mountain, Dan also kindly chopped out and uploaded the live version of You Are Here for us, partly because we particularly liked how the visuals turned out on that one, and partly as a handy illustration of the recent evolution of Nathan's sound. The success of Nathan's translation of the soothing, uplifting melodies of the original version of You Are Here into this meatier, beatier pounding dancefloor version is testament to the devastating power of his live show: to add some of that charge to your own DJ sets, turn to the flipside of the You Are Here single release for souped-up live versions of Drowning In A Sea Of Love tracks 'You Are Here' and 'Stops' tailormade for your turntables. And watch this space for more live footage of the Fake-quake to really ram my point home...
If you like what you see as much as we do, then you might be interested in booking Dan for a VJ set at your club (if so, you can contact him through his website); you may have already spotted his complementary visuals for old friend from art school Luke Abbott's live show, who first introduced us to fellow Norfolk resident (if not true Norfucker like Luke and Nathan) Dan. And you have most definitely also already come across Dan's photographic work, on the cover of Mr Fake's Hard Islands album (as well as the accompanying series of new press shots):
Taken at Happisburgh (pronounced Hays-borough, in authentic quirky Norfolk fashion) beach on the Norfolk coast, around 40 miles from where Nathan grew up, the breezeblock-and-lino cover image is the consequence not of urban neglect as one might assume, but of the voracious North Sea lapping at the coastal frontier of the British Isles, eroding cliffside communities as it goes. The dramatic destruction of the back cover shot places the front image in context (yet another reason why it is always worth tracking down the CD or vinyl!), capturing for posterity the level of erosion on one morning in December of last year. In the intervening six months since the sea has almost certainly already made even further inroads into removing those former clifftop residences - and that microwave will be long gone:
Labels: Luke Abbott, Nathan Fake
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