Very interesting, and I’m gutted it’s not a bit longer, but a good watch when you’ve got five minutes.

Granted, it’s the obvious choice really – and fair play, but I do hope they spend a bit of time checking the deep Manchester scene, and I’d love to see them hit Scotland in some capacity since we’re putting out so much good stuff these days. Blackwax, Koreless, LuckyMe, Paranoise, Gravious, anyone?

However if I had gone, I’m almost certain I’d have enjoyed the Sonar By Night visuals provided by the talented Shaun Bloodworth. His work with Give Up Art (usually involving some of his excellent photography skills) is second to none, and his visuals done for the festival are excellent.

A hypnotising mix of woodland and urban areas, with Mary Anne Hobbs wandering around are pretty mesmerising. I recommend taking a few minutes to check them out.

View them on Vimeo here, or on this page, above.

Image credit: Samantha Meis

View it here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7uYqJJBiD0

An odd combination of robots dancing and getting hit by cars and trains it’s a bit bizarre, but then what else would you expect? Here’s what the director Mark Simpson (of Sixty40) had to say:

Out In The Streets is about lowly domestic bots around the world choosing suicide over recycling. It uses footage group-sourced from friends-with-cameras around the world as background plates for action to take place on. We placed lovingly animated robots into the world and stitched together the tale of a massive failure of robot batteries causing erratic behaviour in otherwise complacent robots. On the one had, a major PR problem for the robot industry, on the other, a major ontological crisis for the individual robots facing recycling.

We worked closely with Africa Hitech to make the track work with the vision and vice versa. While there is robot dancing in the film, it’s not a traditional music video. It’s just a short concept film that works with the music themes. This isn’t totally new by any means, but what makes it really pop is how Mark Pritchard and Steve Spacek edited the track and layered a lot of film music score elements to their track to allow the music to meet the film in the middle. The result is something in between very narrative music video and very banging short film.

Africa Hitech’s debut album 93 Million Miles is out now.

In his words:

There is a story to this one:
Some months ago, I packed my bags, took my girl by the hand and activated the auto-responders – off to South Tirol for a week.
I knew it would be the only time off this year and therewith the only chance to record some fresh nature-sounds without the disturbing humming of hamburg in the back – mobile recorder bagged!

The result: I had a great time running around in  the alps and dolomites at around 2000 meters in altitude, collecting some of the weirdest insect sounds, from crickets & locusts to bees, flies and, for sure, some happy italian cows.
After being back in the studio, I started to edit and trim all the applicable sounds to sort them in my foley-libraries. The longer i listened to those insects, the more I wanted to do a track with those edits and use the sounds in a more or less melodic context. That’s when “Insct” was born.

Right at the same time, Johannes Timpernagel hit me up, telling me about this VVVV Patch he’d been working on and that he needed sound to work something out. The rest is history, haha…

So, some months later, I find myself writing you this little note and I want to give you the opportunity to become a part of this journey just by watching the final animation, looking at the pictures and maybe get a little inspiration from all that.

So, what do we have?

The VVVV Animation by Timpernagel:

The photos from the recordings:
http://www.facebook.com/skyence#!/album.php?aid=34914&id=100000545335679

AND my promise, that the full version of the tune will be on my forthcoming album on Project Mooncircle.
http://www.projectmooncircle.com