Yet another discovery from Big Sound was Sydney based trio The Dead Sea. 

In 2008 the band was great but seeing them this year confirmed a great band was getting even better. To their credit the band says this was most likely the result of having spent a good few months touring in Europe – that kind of workload will get even the sloppiest band match fit!

The band collectively plays in a fair share of other bands (Todd Sparrow, Big Heavy Stuff, Knievel and Decoder Ring to name a few). It’s Decider Ring that draws the most obvious comparisons given the non vocal, compositional nature of the music and a live show littered with a visual images backdrop that creates a great ambience and texture to the music.  I think this really highlights a coming of age and maturity of Australian music that demonstrates an un-restrained approach to creating music that isn’t confined to making hit music.  Very nice.

So on to this clip – it is a piece of work.  Very simple archival footage that came from an Internet archive of public domain footage which has thousands of hours of copyright-free film. Everything from an uploaded film of a sunset last week to vintage ephemeral films from the 50's. Creator Tim Bruniges admits to spending many days cruising the hours and hours of footage until landing this one. I asked him a few questions below:

Stu: It takes a while to work out what is going on and when you do finally realise that the cute happy little girl is getting knives thrown at her head, it creates a sense of uncomfortable anticipation (well for me anyway) of whether we will see something disturbing.  Was that the intention?
 
Tim: Well I guess there was no particular intention other than I was completely absorbed by this particular film the first time I saw it and more specifically the girl's overwhelming sense of serenity in what you would hope anyone would conservatively label a potentially devastating situation! Maybe it gets lost a bit in the drama, but if you pay attention towards the end, I've attempted to reverse the situation by summoning the girl's psychedelic powers which ultimately leads the woman to retract her knives...    

Stu: How do you decide what images to match to your music? The story for the songs is implicit given the vocal free nature of the music...

Tim: That's a hard one to intellectualise, because really the process just comes down to texture and tempo, both visually and sonically, and it's hard to generalise beyond that it's just an instinctive process of trial and error. I enter working with film from a very naive place; I have neither any theoretical or technical knowledge of film making and it's always quite a respite from making music where I generally feel like I should know what I'm doing!
 
I would still say however, that despite the films' abstract nature, I do think of them as containing narrative in a sense; the intention being that at the end of any one piece the viewer can form their own resolution (or not) informed as much by their own memory as anything implied by me.
 
I'm continually amazed at how often sound and image seem to synchronise in the most unexpected yet serendipitous ways, so I'd be lying if I said that I entered into any of these creations with a pre-determined image of every frame mapped out from the start... I guess that's where the pleasure of the process lies for me; the music always comes first and is generally laboured over as opposed to the images, which as a general rule, once generated, just seem to work (to me at least) without too much intervention.
 
http://www.myspace.com/thedeadseamusic