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ZenTV
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A collection of music videos from Coldcut's Ninjatune label
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Home
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The Ninjatune website
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4-ton Mantis
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Badly white-balanced green fluorescent skanky motel room montage of weird and ugly people doing inscrutable things—smashing watermelons, disrobing, being moodily miserable. Pix freezes into Arbusy Polaroid green stills, which then have body parts break off and float through an urban landscape. Oh, and there’s this 4-ton mantis bopping through the city sporadically.
(Directed by Floria Sigismondi)
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Amon Tobin
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Verbal
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Future car race (supposed to be inside a computer) with Rutterford’s trademark quickly morphing surfaces set to Amon’s classic stutter-hop track. Race is very Trony. Interesting niche Rutterford’s carved out for himself (see British Animation Awards 6 and WarpVision).
(Directed by Alex Rutterford)
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Amon Tobin
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Never In, Never Out
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Noodly Boards of Canada-type track with heavier drums set to abstract video. Backplates are wide shots of nature—wheat fields, trees, clouds drifting. Overlayed are frantic vibrating layers of scratches and scribbles and occasional words (“alive”). Blurry and abstract and meaningless, but some nice textures nevertheless.
(Directed by Andy Coleman)
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Animals on Wheels
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Insomniac Olympics
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| Better version of Solitaire. Black and white, guy in apartment whiling away the early morning hours with card tricks. The 3♦ keeps showing up until it disappears entirely from the deck, then appears on TV. Guy goes to check it out, and gets stuck on TV too. Interesting music—stars with a slippery Fanfare for the Common Man brass motif before breaking into typical beats with atypical samples. Nice.
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Blockhead
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Pick It Up
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Highly stylized spaghetti westerners loping through an abstract urban landscape made up of shifting photographic elements pieced together to make a Londonesque streetscape. Reasonable, if meaningless. Okay track—sort of Up, Bustle, and Outy, with breathy flutes and rolling drum solos.
(Directed by Conkerco)
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Bonobo
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Flutter
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| Glowing overlapping blobs of bubbly color slowly resolve into fluttering insect wings, a gun, and a dairy truck crashing backwards. Or something like that. Colorful and pleasantly abstract.
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Bonobo
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Re:Volution
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Cut-up political bites in that patented Coldcut style of layered, sampled, treated video cut together in a seizure stutter. Something to do with British government scandals. Anchored by Blair saying, “the lunatics have taken over the asylum”. I’m sure this means something to somebody. Mediocre at best.
(Directed by Coldcut)
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Coldcut
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DJ Set
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Odd short Japanesey faux commercial for Coldcut action figures. Lots of supercheezy effects and an overexcited hostette. Cool.
(Directed by Rob Pepperell)
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Coldcut
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More Beats and Pieces
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| Typical media overload hyperedit fest also featuring computer animated characters from the aforementioned DJ set. It’s strobophonic.
(Directed by Robin Brunsen)
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Coldcut
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Timber
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Onomatopoetic-hop track in which video of the objects that ostensibly make the percussive sample bed that pervades the track are cut to hyper jittery rhythmia. Tiresome treated pygmy footage with blobby FSOL bubbles, but otherwise quite entertaining.
(Directed by Stuart Warren Hill)
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Coldcut
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Natural Rhythm
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Same thing as Timber, except this one’s built up from nature documentary footage obsessively cut to the stuttery beat. Insanely labor-intensive with a shout out to the “natural history filmmakers” who inspired them.
(Directed by Stuart Warren Hill)
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Coldcut + Hexstatic
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All That You Give
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Flickery faux super-8 style footage of a “band” playing track in a red jazz lounge, deserted save the large older black lady who “sings” the lyrics. Or lyric, really. Sub-par track, but fortunately it’s matched to a lame video concept that’s poorly executed.
(Directed by Eva Katzenmaier + Russ Murphy)
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Chris Clark
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Options in the Fire
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Black and white computer generated mannequins twitch and dance around still of empty urban night (Toronto?). Strange hybrid twitch-hop/acid jazz track. Briefly uses the digital video ffwd/rew effect I’m interested in. Mediocre—but what a rack on the mannequin!
(Directed by Dirk Holzberg)
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Flanger
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Atomic Kitchen
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Burbly effects with occasional bursts of jazzy drumming. Odd, inexplicable video featuring dancing globs of water on a concave surface, then gangs of ball bearings that periodically blow apart and coalesce in space (to the beat) and, finally, something that looks like dancing powder on a vibrating surface. Odd and compelling.
(Directed by Funki Porcini)
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Funki Porcini
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What're You Looking At?
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Abstract (read: boring) ambient intercut with 50’s horror film dialogue. The world in a grain of sand. Slowly spinning flowers. The travels of a dandelion seed in stop-mo twitchivision. Snore.
(Directed by Funki Porcini)
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Funki Porcini
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Rockit Soul
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Cookie-cutter techno track under public domain NASA moon launch footage. A workshop on how to make a video using no money. As exciting as it sounds.
(Directed by Funki Porcini)
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Funki Porcini
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The Missing Suitcase
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Black and white stylish Euro 60’s thriller (shot in Tokyo) involving a (whadda ya know?) missing suitcase and double crossing and all that nifty spy stuff. Great high-contrast look—especially in the airport or whatever it is where the lockers are located.
(Directed by Eye Candy)
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The Herbalizer
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Something Wicked
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| Traditional animation of hipsters rocking it at a swanky club and daisy Pac-men chasing a girl icon. Good looking, but pointless. And a terrible track to boot.
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The Herbalizer
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Wall Crawling Giant Insect Breaks
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This is a journey...back to the early days of hip hop. Or so it says. It’s really just a typically sampladelic collection of semi-random sound bites under a meaningless melange of video textures and graphic overlays. Not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily.
(Directed by The Light Surgeons)
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LFO
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Ninja Tune
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| Faux 70’s stylee bad ninja flick cut-up—except that all the ninja masters appear to be pasty Brits. Footage has been nicely VHSed, but the concept wears thin.
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Hexstatic
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Auto
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Although not officially part of the “naturalist intimately synch’d AV werks” trilogy which contains Timber and Natural Rhythms (Frog Jam from Coldcut’s Let Us Play is the third for you trainspotters), this piece shows the same aesthetic. Track is built up of samples from auto commercials and crash test footage and so on (including a bite from Walter Cronkite), although it’s played multi-screen in little circles on black in stead of hypercut together. Mesmerizing.
(Directed by Hexstatic)
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Hexstatic
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Life in a 4-story b+w building set to generically funky Beck-biting band groove, with a whiff of Latin flavoring. Manic superflat stylee animation featuring stuttery rhythmic repetitions and faux film scratches (why?). Each floor of the building houses a different grotesque activity—from a gym to a sheep dying and shearing operation to a strip club to a professor giving a lecture on the intricacies of carving gyros. Kind of Bathtime in Clerkenwelly (The Animation Show 1), but not as clean. Also somewhat redolent of Hoogerbruge. Weird, and seemingly unrelated to the song, but still interesting.
(Directed by Sophie Choupas)
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Flying Wonders
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Homelife
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Animal Chin
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Jittery acid jazzy glitchy jungle loungecore, Interesting imagery. Layered cut out photos of the band (presumably) cut out and put on savanna animals over postcard style color process backgrounds (like that Royksopp video from Video Niches 1). Extremely jittery and loopy. Fairly interesting.
(Directed by AKFF!)
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Jaga Jazzist
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Day
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Same stuttery cut-out style as Animal Chin. This time the band floats in abstract space in white suits. Nice 2001 kaleidoscopic vibe.
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Jaga Jazzist
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Fender Bender
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Crayony drawn figures in a world of orange. Two old odd guys bump into each other on a corner and get into a fight. One breaks the other’s machine. Baby crawls out of crying machine-less guy’s back and climbs a great stalk to look at the sunset. You know, that old story.
(Directed by Monkmus)
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Kid Koala
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Basin Street Blues
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Turntablist deconstruction of New Orleans funeral classic. Traditional animation—cleaner in style than Fender Bender. Guy dies when three crows fly out of his open head. The funeral marches through the French Quarter, attracting other people to march along, and they all float up through space.
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Kid Koala
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Sunflower Girl
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| Strange mélange of disparate loops strung together in a not-quite-pleasing way. Video is “bad” video stroboscopic wanderings through the mostly natural world. Lots of overlays and blending the sky with water with trees. Makes me want to nap.
(Directed by Riz Maslen)
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Sabres of Paradise
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Get a Move On
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Superflat kid stylee drawings on monochromatic backgrounds twitching to the fonky beats and old old school big band riffs. Supersimple and no great shakes. Vocals by T-Bone Walker.
(Directed by Andy Carthy)
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Mr. Scruff
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Honeydew
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| Different director, same effect. Thick black outlined superflat kid’s drawing multiplane urban streetscape. And some underwater stuff. Somewhat slinky, kinda sexy track with a minimally interesting video.
(Directed by The Box)
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Mr. Scruff
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Sweetsmoke
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Again, different director, exact same result. Superflat kids drawing blah blah blah, this time involving a pie shop in urban environs. Who doesn’t love pie? Well, me, for one.
(Directed by Pete Kidd + Mr. Scruff)
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Mr. Scruff
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Chicken Spit
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Romance among the chicken-suited. Shot verité style, with a dirty lens, complete with bemused onlookers. Not so much. Another video that continues past the music. No discipline.
(Directed by Mark Roche)
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Pest
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Pinball Number Count
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| Groovy, Peter Maxy animation counting up to twelve (with the Pointer Sisters, no less). Authentic piece for Sesame Street, proving just how hip they still are. Lots of fun, educational, and soaked in nostalgia.
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Sesame Street
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Sculpture
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Moody black and white in-studio shots of the band “playing” their instruments (well, somebody else’s instruments really, they’ve clearly never touched the analogue counterparts to their digital axes), while watching old movies on television (Nosferatu, I believe) as the engineer clutches his head. The worst kind of art poseur shite.
(Directed by Lukasz Tunikowski)
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Skalpel
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It's On
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| Gangland murders and drive-by beatdowns perpetrated by poorly drawn bunny-suited cartoon characters over photographic urban backgrounds. Stupid, with an annoying song underneath. There’s a breif moment of coolness in the middle—a kind of superflat psychedelic dream sequence, and the “Vadim” tag painted throughout is nice, but then we’re back to bunnies clubbing each other.
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DJ Vadim
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Receiver
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Cool Klasky-Csupoesque animation about a black and white robot living in some vast machine—the literal cog—who becomes enlightened (electrified), which turns him into color. He makes good his escape, and is pursued by a menacing robodog. Lots of nice details and little Warner Brothers style physical comedy moments. At the end, the robot escapes out of the plug of a random piece of audio gear. Doesn’t seem to have much to do with the song, but is pleasant enough.
(Directed by Tom Perrett (Spaceface))
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Wagon Christ
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| AniFan is a member of the Hypercube collective |
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Home
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copyright 2008 Christopher Earl
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