I hadn’t made a video for a while, so please enjoy The Night We Burned Down Bimbo Deluxe. The entire thing was made out of cheesy digital video effects on the movie making program on my computer, subjected to multiple chance operations.
Not that it matters right now, but I got the date wrong. The music was actually made in 2006 (seems longer than that.) It was made from one of those “temporary” files that Windows creates and then never, ever deletes. The unedited file was played through a sound editor as though it were audio data, and then subjected to four types of randomised filtering through parametric equalisers in Ross Bencina’s fine program AudioMulch, and then mixed by rapid, randomised crossfading between each of the four outputs. What you hear is take four.
So what does all this playing with 21st century technology get me? Maybe it’s the low quality of the sound from the original data file, or maybe it’s because I’m fifty years behind the times, but the piece sounds uncannily like the sort of tape music coming out of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studios in Cologne in the 1950s. In keeping with this sound, and the appropriately grey and grainy video, the title refers to the human phenomenon of futile longing for a vanished world.
Surely I’ve told you all about this before.
