BUG

The evolution of music video

BUG 02, Thursday 5th July 2007, 8:45pm, BFI Southbank

Download these notes as a PDF document, as distributed at the event

Welcome to BUG 02, the second outing of a new event showcasing exceptional music video creativity at BFI Southbank, which follows our very successful debut event in April. Once again it is chock-full of brilliant work in the medium of music video. But this one does include moments that may prove testing if you're feeling a little squeamish, and frankly may even damage your health. You have been warned.

We start the evening with a highly experimental music video which (we cannot stress this strongly enough) contains a great deal of intense strobing. The video is directed by Woody Batts, a young New York director and photographer, and despite its potential harmful effects, we at BUG felt that Beep #1 had to be included due to its brilliant cleaving to Motor's kinetic techno.

That's followed by the first of two videos for The Horrors tonight. It's a viscerally intense experience (as is the second), but Corin Hardy's recently completed video for She Is the New Thing manages to be both blood-drenched and graceful. The band, shot in performance, are terrorised by creatures, and particularly a demonic girl, beautifully drawn in ink (black and red only), and animated by Hardy and his compadre-in-gore, David Lupton. It's a lovely thing the way the live action and animation is merged – although what happens to the poor Horrors by the end isn't lovely at all.

Thankfully our next video is rather more lighthearted, but it's still ingenious. In fact, Shitdisco's OK has arguably more in common with the Artrock movement in music videos we celebrated so entertainingly at the first BUG in April. Director Price James has burst out of East London in the past few months with highly creative low-budget videos for the likes of Simian Mobile Disco and this, for Shitdisco, where he turns the band and the song into a pop-up book.

Following on from that we offer you an extraordinary, stunningly original vision: a bombardment of imagery rendered in numerous artistic styles (Indian religious iconography to Red Chinese and Soviet posters to Western pop art) featuring numerous political and symbolic ideas riffing from the Marxian references in the song. And it's Russian – or more precisely, Belarussian. Well, young men in bands from Woking or Leicester or Leeds just don't do politics any more, do they? Moscow-based Belarussian director/graphic artist Aliaksie Tserakhau directed this for his compatriots Lyapis Trubetskoy, turning Lyapis singer Sergey Mikhalok into a Vishnu-like Beelzebub who sings 'I eat gold bricks for lunch, with diamond dessert and oil cream...' Capital has been a true phenomenon on the internet, but it's on the big screen that it can be seen in its full incredible glory for the first time.

Next is the latest video from a British director who needs no introduction to music video fans, as he's been the source of much of the best work coming out of the UK in the past five years (and has featured in several screenings of BUG's NFT predecessor Antenna). Dougal Wilson's new one is rather more intense than his usual effervescent style, but there's still lots of surprises and humour in a remarkable one-shot video for Bat For Lashes' What's a Girl to Do?, in which BFL's Natasha Khan rides her bike through a darkened wood, apparently alone – at least at first.

Then we come to our special feature of the month. And in contrast to the first BUG, which covered a movement of directors and their videos (the Partizan Artrocking mob to be exact) this time around we will focus on a single individual, who has ploughed a very idiosyncratic furrow for the last few years. Jaron Albertin hails from Vancouver, had his first homemade video shown at Resfest while he was still in college, then moved to Toronto and instantly became an in-demand, award-winning editor and post artist. While holding down his day job, Jaron also managed to direct a series of intense, disarming and totally distinctive videos for the likes of Circlesquare, Cut Copy, Maximo Park, Death from Above 1979 and others, becoming a firm festival favourite in the process.

Since moving to London late last year to concentrate on his directing his productivity in music videos has increased appreciably – in both London and Toronto – so we felt it was a good time to exhibit some of his recent output and demonstrate the range of his talents, from the subtle but brilliantly executed visual effects in Metric's Empty, to the slow-burn and chrome-plated FX of Junior Boys' In the Morning, to the startling combination of the grotesque with the erotic in Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s Weird Science. Yeah, explain that one Mr Albertin!

We follow our focus on Jaron with a number of competition winners. Firstly, there is Jared Eberhardt's video for CSS's Alcohol. Like several other bands in recent months the ultra-hip Brazilian band ran a music video competition a few months ago for the track Alcohol for fans and aspiring video directors, posting green screen footage of themselves performing on the net. But Jared, a young animator from Long Beach California, didn't bother with using the green screen footage. He just created an utterly charming stop motion animation with the band as boozed-up rabbits. And still won the competition. That annoyed a few people, but now you can see why the organisers made a really good choice.

We then continue with a blaze of CADS glory – that being the CADS Music Vision Awards, the awards night for the British music video industry, which was held last week. Adam will review who won the big prizes and present a selection of the winners, starting with Patrick Daughters' extraordinary dizzying one-shot of Feist and a host of dancers performing 1, 2, 3, 4 (if you're near the front you'll really feel those spiralling camera moves); then its our second Horrors video of the night, directed by the unique and unmistakeable Chris Cunningham and starring Samantha Morton – a short sharp eviscerafilled shock to the system which looks amazing on the big screen. Then it's horror of a more gentle nostalgic kind with Barney Clay's homage to Blaxploitation flick Blacula, starring Mario Van Peebles as a wonderfully jaded vampire for Gnarls Barkley's Who Cares? Finally, it's Rozan & Schmeltz's artfully catastrophic video for Justice vs Simian's We Are Your Friends.

That is effectively the climax of our show, but this weekend sees the Live Earth series of concerts, to increase awareness of climate change, and no less than 60 films have been commissioned to address the various issues and problems surrounding this environmental time bomb, playing in various media all over the world. Several of the films have been made by directors who are renowned for their music videos, and we end tonight's BUG by showing just one of those films, directed by top Swedish director Johan Renck, with music by The Knife. It has an important message – and you won't need telling twice.

David Knight

Artist	Title	Direction	Production company	Record company	Country	Length
Motor	Beep #1	Woody Batts		Mute	USA	3:39
The Horrors	She Is The New Thing	Corin Hardy	Academy	Polydor	United Kingdom	2:41
Shitdisco	OK	Price James		Fierce Panda	United Kingdom	3:32
Lyapis Trubetskoy	Capital	Aliaksei Tserakhau	Cosmosfilm.tv	Deti Solntsa	Russia	3:18
Bat For Lashes	What's A Girl To Do?	Dougal Wilson	Colonel Blimp	Parlophone	United Kingdom	2:51
Metric	Empty	Jaron Albertin	Rokkit	Last Gang Records	United Kingdom	3:37
Does It Offend You, Yeah?	Weird Science	Jaron Albertin	Rokkit	Virgin Records	United Kingdom	3:44
Junior Boys	In The Morning	Jaron Albertin	Rokkit	Domino Records	United Kingdom	4:12
CSS	Alcohol	Jared Eberhardt		Subpop	USA	3:00
Feist	1, 2, 3, 4	Patrick Daughters	The Directors Bureau	Polydor	USA/Canada	3:13
The Horrors	Sheena Is A Parasite	Chris Cunningham	Black Dog	Polydor	United Kingdom	1:40
Gnarls Barkley	Who Cares?	Barney Clay	HSI London	Warner	USA	3:34
Justice vs Simian	We Are Your Friends	Rozan & Schmeltz	Partizan	Virgin Records	UK/France	2:40
Live Earth	Cow	Johan Renck	RAF	Music by The Knife		2:19