(Now-)Ghostly artist Com Truise, based in Princeton, NJ, has become a hot item musically in the last few months, manufacturing a regular Komputer Cast podcast and a celebrated release entitled Cyanide Sisters. His music, “slow-motion funk” renderings of lo-fidelity synths, seems to have hit a nerve.
But he deserves special mention here for the eyeball-massaging, deliciously dreamy “FairLight” music video, which perfectly captures the world he inhabits, somewhere between a digital past and the future that never quite came to pass.
It’s the work of 10lb Pictures, aka Will Joines & Sowjanya Kudva, a fairly unknown house out of Brooklyn.
I’m normally a little wary these days of 80s nostalgia – folks in my generation are just about to cross the line where we’re old enough that this ceases to be ironic nostalgia, and we’re just, um, actually beginning to get old and out of touch.
But pay no mind – this is actually pretty damned brilliant. It’s the future that wasn’t, or as Yogi Berra put it better, the future ain’t what it used to be. There’s pitch-perfect VHS glitch! Lasers shoot out of space! It’s a universe filled with perfectly-designed consumer gear, minimal enough to make Dieter Rams glow! It’s the digital universe of Tron! Sony electronics even work! Looking at it, you realize that some visual stylings of the era, far from dating, actually look more contemporary. That’s the same hope I have for the synth sounds themselves – that maybe the advantage of history and distance will be perspective, a sense of lasting value that tech didn’t have in the disposable 80s boom.
Anyway, bonus points for how much you can spot. (I’m embarrassed to be able to recognize the bits in the VHS-distorted tag.
I looked for more work of the same caliber from 10lb, but I think maybe they haven’t made it yet, but will. Instead, here’s a more run-of-the-mill video for electronic songstress Sally Shapiro. I love living in New York. But sure, sometimes I dream of taking the love of my life up on Metro North to a field somewhere upstate where we can gaze into the void while wearing expensive headphones. So, yeah, this video hit me perhaps too close to home. (Now, if Brian Crabtree would just show up in that field, bearing an Arc for me, I’d know I was dreaming…)
Com Truise on ISO50, guest music post