I’ve been so busy at work this last week that I had very little time to devote to preparing this months mm-cc video.  After the last one, I vowed to have all my video elements collected ahead of time so that when it came time to cut I’d be able to move quick.  This was the big delay in posting the last mm-cc.  Well, this time I had all my video elements prepared but my work had me so busy I couldn’t start cutting down the audio until the weekend.

For those of you who don’t know, mm-cc stands for Morning Music & Coffee Consumption.  It is an idea started by Jared at uprlip.com.  The concept is simple.  Get together with your friends early on a Sunday morning and make some music with them.  I’m hosting one of them the first Sunday of every month over the summer.

This mm-cc was a much more mellow occasion than the last one, which kind of made it more pleasurable.  No stressing on technicalities.  I brought the modular out this time and began the noise-making with a patch.  It was a very peaceful sound which set us all off on some mellow tinkering with the instruments.  Eventually, we hit our groove and the jams meandered in and out of different rhythms, melodies and bass lines.

We started and stopped quite a few times and I recorded almost all of it.  I had trouble choosing which melodies to highlight.  I narrowed it down to two of my favorite ones.  Even though I knew that having both of them in full in the video was going to make it too long, I decided to cut a short snippet from the second one and tack it to the beginning of the video.
 

 
The visual elements in this video is some of the material I’ve collected for the Cue The Moon music video I’ve been working on.  For the past few weeks I have been rendering slitscan shots like a madman.  So, I figured I’d use this mm-cc video as an excuse to play around with some of those shots.  I’m still in the process of shooting for the music video.  I’ve ramped up as of late because Jenny and I are off to Wisconsin on the 17th of this month for a week-long family vacation.  I want to have as much footage as possible before then so I can take it with me and edit.  It won’t be all water shots of course but water just looks so beautiful in slitscan that it will be a major element.  In fact, I am shooting over the next couple of evenings on it.  This time with actual humans.  I’m kind of excited about it.  I built an extra large lazy susan for it.  More on that later.
 

 
For the video, I sort of pulled my inspiration from Don Whitaker’s video called “Liquid Meditations”.  In that video Don takes some of his many collected nature shots and, through the use of a simple mirror effect, creates these spiritual compositions out of it.  It’s really beautiful and I recommend checking it out.

Reuben Mahler – Guitar, Soundlab

Jeff Numainville – Banjo

Mike Goggin – Guitar, Bass

Bob Lexan – Drums

Charlie Visnic – Monome, Modular

Anyways, I hope you enjoy the song and video!  Check out other mm-cc videos here.