Bearded Miracles

Ever since 2006, when Time magazine named “You” the person of the year, Youtube has been nurturing a burgeoning culture of home digital video production. This is similar to the way digital sound editing and music making software has been nurturing a new culture of “bedroom producers” since the 1990s.

But Youtube is changing more than video production and distribution. Thanks to synaesthesia, and the fact that videos contain both picture and sound, Youtube is also having an impact on audio production. It provides musicians with a huge archive of free sounds/samples that can easily be captured and edited. Videos of lectures, speeches and interviews contain useful sound bites. Instructional videos on how to play a musical instrument contain isolated sounds of a single instrument. Youtube has also made it easier for home music producers to release their own music videos.

Perhaps most exciting of all, Youtube enables home producers who are skilled with both video and audio editing to combine the two in clever ways. When artists use sound clips from a video to make music, what happens to the corresponding video? Although some producers might only use video as a source for audio samples, many on youtube use the video, too. This means that each sound clip is accompanied by a corresponding video clip, which repeats rhythmically each time the sound plays. The result is a glitchy, recombinant video that complements the chunky, “frankenstein” aesthetic of sample-based music that is already familiar for us (and aggressively promote on this website). These artists make rhythm as important visually as it is aurally.

The first I encountered was LASSE GJERSTEN. His video “Amateur” has been widely shared on the internet and viewed over 10,000,000 times. He was the first artist I knew about who exploited this technique of sequencing video clips to make music.

SWEDE MASON describes his work as “postironica nonsensica.” He takes the videos he samples so far out of context that they become absurd. He repeats spoken phrases until they’re either irritating or so repetitive that they lose their linguistic meaning and become pure noise.

AIRLOAF combines DJ mixes of drum’n’bass with video of protestants experiencing religious ecstasy and dancing in church. The combination is uncanny because ecstatic, gospel Protestantism was (and is) hugely popular in Jamaica, and was a major influence on Reggae music and Rasta spirituality. Reggae and Rasta, in turn, were a huge influence on British drum’n’bass. By synching audio and video from these seemingly disparate sources, Airloaf reminds us of these lineages and influences stretching across the British Empire. Airloaf also shows how similar “being moved by the spirit” is to moving around at a rave. We’re dealing in both cases with special cultural spaces designated as places to ‘get happy’ and ‘get wild,’ places to cut loose and lose yourself in something bigger.

The following are stills taken from an Airloaf video, in which a woman flailing in religious ecstasy has been hacked, embellished with caption bubbles that ask the DJ to rewind.