Music: vintage Yamaha PSR-110 keyboard graphics form a kaleidoscopic moving collage in design agency Pentagram’s very first ever music video, developed for Jesse Hackett’s track Dump Run.
The video was directed by Pentagram partner Naresh Ramchandani, who had previously collaborated with Hackett on a piece for his environmental charity Do The Green Issue, when the artist created a track employing scrap wood and metal.
When he found out that Hackett had manufactured an total album on a Yamaha PSR-a hundred keyboard found in a rubbish dump, Ramchandani saw the possibility to make the most of “a video gift from the gods”.
“I observed all its graphic particulars – symbols of lions, bids and trains, weird and fantastic music genres, basic instructional buttons – and then realised that we could make a video practically totally from the keyboard in the identical way that Jesse had produced a song from it,” he informed Dezeen.
Related story: Henning M Lederer depicts the human physique as a machine for Max Cooper’s Anatomic music video
“With the combination of unintentionally kitsch pictograms of animal noises and instruments, and yellow uppercase sample names that looked like they had been created for a console in [1970s sci-fi Television series] Blake’s 7, the keyboard was like a graphics sweet store waiting to be raided,” he added.
The film launches into the action with flashing graphics of drums and cymbals colliding, prior to moving to live action to introduce Hackett.
The camera demonstrates swift flashes of street signage, interspersed with shots of Hackett looking through a dumpster.
As he finds an abandoned keyboard, the action is intercut with flashing lyrics and much more crashing cymbals, and symbols of lions and elephants.
As Hackett starts to perform the keyboard the true world and the graphic world commence to combine, until he blends into a dancing symbol of himself.
It marks the very first music video for the agency, which has designed record covers, books, magazines and identities for art galleries and institutions – such as the visual identity for MIT Media Lab.
“It was so significantly obligation in so several techniques,” Ramchandani said. “I desired to do something various from the pop promo norm. There are so numerous formulaic video clips created every single month and I didn’t want to do 1 of people.”
Related story: Dropbear recreates retro video video games employing outdated cassettes in Opiuo’s Quack Fat music video
The graphics from the video have been all borrowed from Hackett’s keyboard – individually retouched to make them a lot more vibrant before getting turned into animated sequences.
“We then edited them all together in a way that gets more and much more frantic as the song goes on,” Ramchandani stated. “It really is like an increasingly manic firework display of kitsch graphic explosions.
To match the dwell action with the vintage symbols, the movie was manufactured to appear as if it had been shot on a VHS recorder, which Ramchandani mentioned was “corny but also sort of nice”.
Despite the fact that only their very first foray into the word of music videos, Ramchandani is assured that there’ll be a lot much more to come.
“If you are artist with a track and you want a video and you don’t mind if the video is nothing like a video, you know exactly where to uncover us,” he informed Dezeen.
Dump Run is taken from Jesse Hackett’s debut album Junk, which was launched on 17 July 2015.
