#21: halcyon days
Welcome to issue #21 of THIS NEWSLETTER CANNOT SAVE YOU, the newsletter that dares to ask that musical question:
I regret to inform you that no good answers to that question are forthcoming.
Highlights From Scottoworld
This entire section is skippable if you're not in the mood for an "adventures in extreme media archiving" update. No one will know if you skip straight to the video links below this section.
In 1996, MTV premiered a show in America called AMP, a late-night block of electronic and trip-hop music videos that developed a cult following and helped introduce electronica to the mainstream. You hear legends of how people would leave clubs and parties to go home and watch this program at midnight on a Saturday or whatever. It was a double-whammy of an experience: cutting edge videos coupled with groundbreaking music, which made for mind-blowing viewing to a lot of people.
I wasn't paying for cable at that point in my life, so I missed the entire run of the show. I've since seen some of the videos they screened, of course, but not all of them. I'm the kind of person who goes for recreational activities like "watch the entire Björk videography in one sitting" (this takes around five hours, if you've got them all handy) so I casually decided recently I would simply "watch every video that appeared on AMP." What could go wrong, etc.
Cursory research quickly convinced me to amend the idea to "watch every video that appeared on AMP season one," because the data beyond season one gets pretty spotty. A fan maintained an episode guide contemporaneously with the first year of the show, though, which was captured by the Wayback Machine. Thanks to this document, we know every video they played during AMP season one. I was able to verify the doc's accuracy against a crucial but incomplete archive of recorded episodes uploaded to the Internet Archive by AMP's co-creators, Todd Mueller & Burle Avant.
In the 34 commercial-stuffed, hour-long episodes that ran throughout 1997, after de-duping all the many repeats of popular videos, by my count MTV aired recognizable chunks of 217 stand-alone music videos during season one. The hunt was on to find the highest quality version of each video that I could track down. No sense watching low resolution tape dubs if remastered HD versions existed. Many bands and artists have taken good care of their video legacies, as it were. Other bands and artists don't seem to care, allowing their videos to languish in the same low resolution they were originally uploaded in back at the dawn of time or whatever. It's shameful.
Many of the videos I was looking for can only be found in the form of VHS dubs by random viewers who happened to record blocks of MTV (shows like Party Zone or Chill Out Zone on MTV Europe and MTV Brazil stole liberally from AMP's playlists), then managed to hang onto the VHS tapes long enough to digitize and upload them. Sometimes a band breaks up acrimoniously or dissolves uneventfully, or a record label folds, and specific videos or entire YouTube channels disappear without warning. These VHS archivists are out there plugging some of the gaps.
I found some of the videos I needed on Vimeo, where industry professionals often post their work, including music videos, to their profiles. I scooped up several used retail DVDs to close a few gaps. I stumbled across the world of subscription video pool marketing services from that era that catered to disc jockeys and night clubs; every month you'd get a compilation tape or DVD of new videos to use on your bar TVs or your stage video screens, which you were supposed to return when a new one arrived. Many of these DVD sets escaped into a murky resale underworld, where I scooped up a key missing video and upgraded several others. One of the last remaining videos I needed was for a track called "Barcode" by an artist named Scanner. Imagine the search results you get when you include "scanner" and "barcode" together in your search query these days. But Scanner has a real name, and his real name has a website, where he'd transferred the video himself from his personal VHS copy onto his blog.
In the end, I located 216 out of 217 videos and then accepted defeat, modifying the idea one last time to "watch all but one of the videos that appeared on AMP season one." I'm not doing this in one sitting, rather these videos fade in and out of focus in between trying to keep up with other things. So far it's been a lot of nerdy connecting-the-dots about directors and animators; super jittery editing and cyber-dystopian production designs; doses of rudimentary computer animation that would be unwatchable if not for the nostalgia factor; some pretty weird and great videos from other genres thrown in to keep viewers on their toes ("yes, that was a delightful Morcheeba video, now here's The Residents"); and a lot of really excellent electronic music even when the videos are meh. The occasional discovery or re-discovery of outright gems is the reward that theoretically drives the entire endeavor. In other words, it's pretty much the usual workflow for me, except narrowed to the 1990s. But scouring the internet for missing music videos was kinda more fun than I expected, so I'm already ahead.
Anyway, this project is what I was working on instead of writing this newsletter a couple weeks ago, oops.
Scottovision
Meanwhile, the present-day queue waited patiently for my return from 1997, rewarding me with some of the weirdness listed below.
"Care More, Care Forever" (2022) - Technically this is episode two of the hyper-dystopian, 3D-animated series "Care More," but it's entirely self-contained if you don't want to play catch up with episode one. NOWNESS summarized this episode pretty succinctly: "Follow a man's nightmarish holiday in the metaverse." I guess it might eventually be trouble if control of your own sensorium is dependent upon having room on your credit card.
"Shuttles" (2017) - A short film produced and directed by the Parisian agency Pleix, using amateur found footage to reconstruct the day that the Americans launched five side-by-side space shuttles at the same time. What do you mean, that never happened?
"お茶 (tea)" (2022) - One of my favorite directors, Sojiro Kamatani, helmed the latest video from Japanese singer UA (whose name is a Swahili word that means both "flower" and "kill"). Sojiro is the genius behind such videos as "Ponpara Pecorna Papiyotta" by the mysterious girl group/marketing stunt known as 5572320, and "Baku" by Wednesday Campanella. This one is a worthy addition to his music video repertoire, a gorgeous smear of hallucinatory texture and wonder that defies description. You would be right to ask wtf is in the tea she's drinking.
"All Mine" (1997) and "Only You" (1998) - The seminal trip-hop band Portishead recently upgraded its modest videography to HD. These are the two clear stand-outs: "All Mine" was apparently imagined as a cross between an old Italian music show and an episode of The Outer Limits (directed by Dick Carruthers); "Only You" is a murky masterpiece of underwater moodiness, directed by Chris Cunningham (known for his intensely bizarre collaborations with Aphex Twin as well as the Björk video "All Is Full Of Love").
"A Message From The Future" (2022) - A new infomercial from Adult Swim: "In a harsh world following the nuclear disaster of May 2020, six candidates launch their political campaigns to become Top Worlder Chieftain." This is that rarest of dystopian comedies - one that dares to imagine some form of representative democracy will exist in the future.
"Block Party" (2022) - UK dance company Rambert teams up with director/choreographer Megan Lawson (who's choreographed videos and tours for Adele, Madonna, and Katy Perry) for this whirlwind piece that "explores creative block and the elusive search for inspiration; stacking and unstacking the unpredictable one piece at a time." Certainly no one was suffering from creative block when they put this inventive dance film together.
"Deviant Disco" (2019) - Nominated for Best Concept at the 2020 Berlin Music Video Awards, this video is technically part two in a trilogy (parts one and three are entirely optional) directed by David LaChapelle for his frequent collaborator, Daphne Guinness. I'm scheduled to do a deeper dive into Daphne Guinness at some point, but this will suffice in the meantime. Oh, what's the actual concept that earned this video a Best Concept nomination? Beats me.
"Yellow Cake" (2009) - An anti-capitalist fairy tale animated in a Ren & Stimpy style, freshly remastered for your viewing pleasure. The freedom-loving mice of New Baker Town face off against the literal fat cats who oppress them, and learn the hard way that the cost of revolution is steep. It's a fast-paced series of "well that escalated quickly" moments that catapult you into a singularity of an ending. Created by Nick Cross, who also made "Pig Goat Banana Mantis" (it's like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, except it's Pig Goat Banana Mantis).
"Drop Shadow" by Eyeliner (2022) - Please understand how I bring you the best music videos.
"Real DJ's use REELS." (2022) - Mr. Tape demonstrates his mad skills in the underappreciated art of reel-to-reel scratching.
Exit Music
Sending you out this time around with an audiovisual mix from Solid Steel luminary DJ Food: a mix called "O is for Orange" that he devised for a Boards of Canada-themed night in London back in 2013. As he describes it: "‘O Is For Orange’ is the sound of weathered tape saturation, detuned analogue synthesisers, vinyl crackle and machine hum. It’s also the look of unfocused, flickering lenses, mirror image filters and blurry grain embedded into film. Unofficial fan films sit alongside experimental animation, public information shorts and even the odd official video. Material that BoC took inspiration from blends with their own work as well as many that they inspired." So yeah, lots of Boards of Canada on this mix, plus appearances from Prefuse 73, Wagon Christ, Broadcast, Autechre, and DJ Food himself of course. The video is almost always uniquely paired to the audio specifically for this mix. It's quite a nice little multimedia experience.
Here is the YouTube playlist featuring almost all the recommendations from this issue; a link to the missing item is provided in the description. If you like this newsletter, please consider passing it along to a friend.
Until next time, I remain your friendly correspondent, thinking of you,
Scotto
Scotto Moore is the author of BATTLE OF THE LINGUIST MAGES and YOUR FAVORITE BAND CANNOT SAVE YOU.