BE MY SHADE

Here's a beautiful visual accompaniment to one of the many gems from Jeans Wilder's Nice Trash LP, rendered here in some colour inverted, impressionistic super-8 footage that looks like a real-time watercolour.

buy / bandcamp

NUCLEAR CITY

Check out the hilarious video for Estate's new jam, Nuclear City - the Minneapolis bros' dreamy electro soundtracks amusingly outdated retro-futurism (newspaper headline: "COMPUTER MURDER SUSPECT ESCAPES!") in this video from Pat Vamos, who draws on clips from "Paper Man, The Failing of Raymond, Incident at Channel Z, Brain Waves, U.F.O., Bionic Showdown, C.O.N.D.O.R., some Japanese documentary on body pulses & more". I say that like I've ever heard of any of those! Anyway, it's a fantastic video. Great job Pat Vamos!

THE DETOUR

Woah just got home after a week of some "intense partying" + work overload to Kevin Costner on the TV, first w/ Maori people dancing but then a red convertible cruisin', then, YACHTS, which ties in pretty nicely with an email containing a new Wonder Wheel video for a jam that is janglier than what I remember and kind of riduculously fitting with both tiredness and the found video clip and its old desperate B&W drama The Detour. It's the first we've heard from newest Wonder Wheel album Brave New World WHICH apparently is also the 23rd full-length WW release. WTF!

[Wonder Wheel MySpace / Blog]

DRUG STAR

Way into this new live vid of Nick Ray and guitarist bud Ben from our eternal favourites Speculator. Witness the pair tearing it up on the LA freeway in a car while playing "Driving in My Car" - could it be any more perfect? Check out two more vids over at We Are Rebels.
P.S. Chillers in the LA area: be sure to catch Speculator live along with Sun Araw, Pure Ecstasy and Sleep ∞ Over July 30th at Showcave, Eagle Rock.

[Speculator Myspace]

NEW PIKELET VIDEO

It's been a while since we first heard Weakest Link, the standout track from Pikelet's wonderful second album Stem. And now it has a video! Melbourne artist Laura Cashman assembled this beautifully childlike and tactile stop motion accompaniment, which picks up on Weakest Link's lyrical naivety and throbbing, propulsive feel. Stop motion music videos have taken off in a large-ish way recently, but there's a streak of self-awareness here that sets it apart: Evelyn Morris' paper avatar seems simply bemused about being caught in the middle of a line of twirling cut-out ballerinas.

[Pikelet MySpace / Facebook]

[Buy Stem from Chapter Music]

NEW STREET CHANT VIDEO

Witness the ultra-photogenic NZ power popsters rock a subterranean grotto while fans in terrifying masks go sick. This beautifully shot video is as much of a step up from the earlier Scream Walk as the song itself: high fidelity, but still endearingly rough around the edges and catchy as fuck. Their debut album Means is out later this year.

[Street Chant MySpace / Facebook]

I WANT MY NUKE TV

DEMON CHANNELS from OESB // FUTURE SOUND on Vimeo.

Yikes! Tune into this two-track excerpt from Demon Channels, a "full length feature"(!) out later this year by James Ferraro. The first half, "Wild World"/"Cheez Whiz in Fast Forward" is making me super psyched for when Richard and I visit LA later this year (also going to NYC too for CMJ, hang out w/ us plz!) -- entering some seriously whacked hyperreal zones, watching FOX News, going on the iFly, eating some Dunkin' Donuts, drinking Pepsi etc. The second half, "Feed Me"/"Motel Christmas" is an alternate vision of LA; dumpster divers, MTV punks, totally disgusting TV dinners, video surveillance etc., but the more I watch this the more each vision kind of looks/feels the same.

[Muscleworks Inc.]

[Buy James Ferraro releases from Olde English Spelling Bee]

0900 SOLAR BOARDING

STEEL ESCAPE from Zahid Jiwa on Vimeo.

Hey all, just a heads up about this totally sick video art show that I've co-curated going down in my hometown Christchurch, New Zealand this Friday. It sort of grew out David Keenan's description of "Hypnagogic Pop" in an issue of last year's Wire magazine, so we've got a totally varied bunch of related vis-aur-al material including amazing music videos from the likes of James Ferraro (above), Ducktails, Oneohtrix Point Never, Speculator, Matrix Metals, and video art pieces from Nate Boyce, Sean McCann and Jeffrey Joyal (New Yoga) and Carlos Laszlo's revised Dark Bong video collage.

The show opens this Friday at 6PM at HSP Gallery, 84 Lichfield Street and runs until April 10. Totally check it out!

More show details/press information here

[HSP Gallery]