Happy Friday the 13th! A lucky day for us, to be sure– in addition to Ross’s regular installment of the FAM, Coilhouse is proud to present NERVOUS96, a new, suspenseful, next-to-silent retro sci-fi short by director Bill Domonkos.
Inspired by original musical seance recordings by longtime ‘Haus favorite Jill Tracy, and the deliciously spooky violin of Paul Mercer, Domonkos has taken vintage footage and repurposed it to present the tale of a frantic, lonely woman, increasingly overwhelmed by debt and uncertainty in a world where technology has become increasingly invasive, even menacing. His “complex chiaroscuro style marks a marriage between silent-era special effects master George Méliès and the digital age.”
“Single white female. Lonely, Seeking soul mate. Humanoid preferred…”
From the NERVOUS96 press release:
Known for his distinctive craft of manipulated archival footage combined with 2D and 3D computer animation, special effects, and photography, Jill Tracy fans best know Bay Area filmmaker Bill Domonkos for the multiple award-winning “The Fine Art of Poisoning,” and his collection of acclaimed videos for legendary masked band The Residents.
“The Fine Art of Poisoning,” (set to Jill Tracy’s seminal song) has become a cult favorite, garnering praise from Clive Barker, Guy Maddin, writer Warren Ellis, and well-over 100,000 views on YouTube, and a recent screening at London’s famed National Gallery.
Domonkos was completely inspired by pianist Jill Tracy and violinist Paul Mercer’s “Musical Séance,” a poignant live project that employs the duo’s astonishing channeled improvisations. Domonkos meticulously crafted excerpts from actual séance recordings to create the emotional voice of the “NERVOUS96” character.
(Click those arrows on the right to watch it full screen.) The musical score for NERVOUS96 is also available for download on Bandcamp. Congratulations to Domonkos/Tracy/Mercer on this sharp and toothsome indie triumph.
Danger Beach’s “Apache” is a beautiful instrumental with a simply fantastic animated video, directed by Ned Wenlock, featuring a guitar wielding Native American — accompanied by a bison and a Sasquatch, also equipped with guitars — playing the melody through a constantly spiraling and shifting landscape. It’s really, very well done and Mr. Wenlock has taken the time to explain how he did the whole thing here, for those technically minded people who may be interested. I’ve watched this three or four times since first finding it and it gets better every time.
So far, askVegan Black Metal Chef only has once video uploaded to his YouTube channel, for BRVTAL vegan pad thai. Let us pray fervently to the dark lords for more. Many tofurkies must be sacrificed to ensure that Vegan Black Metal Chef COOKS AGAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNN-AH.
Over in a SomethingAwful forums titled 3D Emoticons Redux – Now With NEWTONIAN Physics!, SchmuckFeatures writes, “I’m sure everyone’s familiar with this image:”
“My version of it turned into… this.”
Music: “Vessels” by Philip Glass, from Koyaanisqatsi. Via Kyle McElroy.
Everything’s majestic +1 when you throw some Philip Glass at it, eh?
After more than a decade, ruddily engorged by countless commercial and artistic coups d’états, the Kansas City-based design and filmmaking collective known as MK12 still excels at chewing bubblegum and kicking ass and making the baby Jebus cry. PROOF:
FITC is a design and technology events company that celebrated their 10th annual flagship event in Toronto just last week. MK12 produced this brief-but-brutal animated title film to mark the occasion. Indelibly. In your shuddering brainmeats. For all eternity. Nnnngh.
Pipe dream of the day: MK12 makes a full-length movie in cahoots with Al Columbia.
The amount of music Seeger has made in support of civil rights, cultural tolerance, non-violence, and environmental protection over the past century is epic. Songs he either composed or co-wrote include: “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?,” “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song),” and “Turn, Turn, Turn!” He –in cahoots with Joan Baez– was also greatly responsible for popularizing the spiritual “We Shall Overcome” during the 60s.
Seeger was just shy of his 90th birthday at the time of the above Letterman performance, during which he intoned: “We sang about Alabama 1955, but since 9/11, we wonder, will this world survive? The world learned a lesson from Dr. King: we can survive, we can, we will, and so we sing. Don’t say it can’t be done; The battle’s just begun. Take it from Dr. King, you too can learn to sing, so drop the gun.”
He is 92 years young today.
Via Wiki: Pete Seeger entertaining Eleanor Roosevelt (center), honored guest at a racially integrated Valentine’s Day party marking the opening of a Canteen of the United Federal Labor, CIO, in then-segregated Washington, D.C. Photographed by Joseph Horne for the Office of War Information, 1944.
Many of us have heard about the apparent laughter of rats. Now, Smithsonian Magazine is reporting that a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, has ascertained that certain high-pitched sounds made by mice could actually be melodious songs. Some excerpts from author Rob Dunn’s coverage:
In late 1925, one J. L. Clark discovered an unusual mouse in a house in Detroit. It could sing. And so he did what anyone might have done: he captured the mouse and put it in a cage. There it produced a lyrical tune as if it were a bird. A musician named Martha Grim visited the mouse, commented on the impurity of its tones and left, musical standards being high in Detroit. Clark gave the mouse to scientists at the University of Michigan. The scientists confirmed that the mouse could sing and then bred it with laboratory house mice. Some offspring produced a faint “chitter,” but none inherited the father’s melodic chops. These observations were all noted in a scientific article in 1932 and mostly forgotten.
Recently, though, Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell, a biologist at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, revisited the mystery of the singing mouse. And after figuring out how to listen to mice on their own terms, she heard something entirely new. […]
The world of rodents, long thought mostly quiet, may be full of songs, broadcast short distances, from one animal to another, songs that we still know very little about. […]
Her discovery reminds us that each species perceives the world in a unique way, with a finely tuned set of senses, and so finds itself in a slightly different world. Bacteria call to each other with chemicals. Mosquitoes detect the carbon dioxide we exhale. Ants see polarized light. Turtles navigate using the earth’s magnetic field. Birds see ultraviolet markings on flowers, signs invisible to us. Snakes home in on the heat in a cougar’s footprint or a rabbit’s breath. Most of these different worlds are little understood because of the narrow reach of our own perceptions. Kalcounis-Rueppell hears music in the dark, but as a species we still fumble around.
Photo by Lynda Richardson for Smithsonian Mag. Kalcounis-Rueppell examines a wav file.
It’s remarkable, how new perceptions of something so tiny could make our world suddenly seem so much larger. The entire Smithsonian article is astonishing. Check it out, and make sure to listen to Kalcounis-Rueppell’s audio file of mice vocalizing. It sounds, for all the world, like the wooing songs of tiny whales.
And then, from the west, in shrieking answer to Munamies, Eggman of Finland, came the lacerating solfege of Volturyon‘s lead singer, Olle Ekman of Sweden:
Is that the most KVLT rec room/rehearsal space you’ve ever seen, or what? Love those pastel floral stencils.
That’s musician Sxip Shirey, doing something beautifully strange to a paper-clipped guitar (all live, no overdubs), followed by several more clips from various other performances and collaborations. Sxip’s been a pillar of strength in the NYC countercultural circus/vaudeville/music world for many years, not just as a composer and performer, but as a storyteller, a tireless nurturer of up-and-comers, and as an instigator of unexpected and wondrous happenings.
In addition to implementing “prepared” alterations of traditional instruments and piping their sounds through various effects pedals, he often crafts songs out of junkyard found objects, vintage toys, rusty noisemakers, and sometimes, just by breathing.
His albums are unlike anything you’ve heard. You can buy them here. If he ever comes to your town (and the man travels a lot!), either solo, or with his traveling show, Sxip’s Hour of Charm, or the lovely Balkan-laced Luminescent Orchestrii, or with Gentlemen & Assassins (his new trio with the comparatively strange and beautiful s(tr)ongmen Elyas Khan and Brian Viglione), do not miss him.
Singing, healing dancing, sovaldi sale contortionist/acrobat sibling sensations of stage and screen, The Ross Sisters, Aggie and Maggie and Elmira Ross (real names: Veda, Betsy Ann and Dixie), have been internet legends for years, thanks to gunked up, third generation bootlegs of their astonishing act from the 1944 Technicolor musical, Broadway Rhythm, circulating on YouTube. But here, at last, is a crisp, clear, DVD quality upload of the girls in all of their wildly contorted, three-part-harmonized-and-grinning-all-the-while glory:
Via E. Stephen, who says, “Their facial expressions are priceless… even before they all exhibit unnervingly inhuman capabilities.”
