In this generally referent-driven game of video reviewing (AKA This Is Like This), there are a few things that come to mind immediately watching the fantastic new music video by Andy Ray (@youthracket) for Austin’s dance outfit BAXU: Marilyn Minter produces a Jane Fonda workout for a late nite infomercial on an upper 100s Videodrome channel! John Carpenter, Jess Franco, and Lady Snowblood find an abandoned U-Haul full of half-destroyed CCTVs on their way home from a week-long bender! Salome (this one, not these ones) gets run through a translation device into binary for a theater full of droids and recklessly translated back into something meat can perceive! It strikes me, though, based on the myriad wormholes my brain immediately and automatically rips open, that this isn’t the point. Maybe it’s better to just cruise the wave… and what a wave it is. Take a look:

I read recently this captivating, flattened but gutsy sum-up of the difference between classical and modern art: good modern art provokes the same level of intense emotion that classical art did, but you can no longer explain why. I’d add to that: 21st century proclivities for infinite gear, obsessive dial twisting, and new ways to edit. There’s a reason this sort of chaotic and hand-distorted analog video rules a particular brand of live concert — it’s an acid-drenched blank slate that provides ostensible room for what you want to project of yourself onto it while also gripping that projection and spinning it totally out of control. The advent of this age’s wider range of technology than one human brain can possibly comprehend has made us compulsive, made us experimental to the point of artful accidents, made us cyborgs either gleaming or lived-in. The age brings us full-on cosmic spasms of ideas that sometimes manifest as video art — as long as it produces artifacts like this, seems fine by me.

ANYHOW, the video and track fuse perfectly! The barrage of colors, textures, images, and painterly (VJ-erly?) techniques here are balanced by the occasional tactile nature of the track’s instrumentation. Make sure to stay tuned to read through the mind-bogglingly long list of equipment used to create all the brain-twisting effects you see here… worth the price of admission alone, honestly. In the end, though, this is a perfect excuse to turn on, tune in, and drop out. As always, headphones in and project it on the biggest surface you can find.

Andy was kind enough to send over an absolute WEALTH of details regarding the process for putting together this wild trip, which we’ve included basically un-edited here. Tech-heads, eat your heart out!

“I did a video for badass garage psych group Leather Girls awhile back, and I love the dance floor-filling vibe of former member Mike Garrido’s new duo with Michael Regino, BAXU. So when the Mikes asked me to film something over the pandemic for their tune “X-Rated,” I came up with a cyberpunk noir look that seemed to gel with their synth-sleaze sound, and which I could safely make in my studio, filmed straight off a CRT.

“I used this TV that has a transparent housing which I like because it makes for a nice clear frame around the image. I had local electronics genius Kyle Evans (Cracked Ray Tube/Pulsecoder) mod it so that the horizontal and vertical hold can be fluctuated by audio, aka a Paik-style “Wobbulator,” by trading him a super rare AcoustiColor Audio Kaleidoscope (similar to the much more common Atari Video Music), which creates the wild liquid gyrations you see. I took my AcoustiColor into the folks at Switched On for repair once — they had never seen one before and made a great little demo video that you can watch on their website, in case anyone’s interested in these cool forgotten psychedelic gizmos of the 70s.

“Anyway I shot the VHS sample source with an old tube camera (kinda like a tube amp, it provides the warm, glazed, smear-y public access channel tracer effects). The tape was also being run through a series of outboard analog FX boxes like an LZX Vidiot (for luma processing), Videonics MX-1 (gooey feedback), Big Pauper Fluxus (tasteful overdrive), and an Archer Video Enhancer circuit-bent by Logan of Tachyons+ (for blown-out color bleeds and harsh sync corruption). Technical terms aside, it’s just twiddling knobs till you get something cool looking!

“If your readers are curious about trying some of these awesome handmade toys, I actually got my former employer, Rock N Roll Rentals, to carry the BPMC & Tachyons line of units, so go rent one — they’re a blast! If you think of your TV like your amp, and the output device (VCR, DVD, Cassette) like your guitar, these are like the boutique guitar pedals and modded vintage stompboxes of the video synthesis world. Finally I also threw in some Critter & Guitari Video Scope action for some glitchy abstract audio-reactive shapeshifting fun, and straight obliterated any remaining composite video signal through a temporal vortex slitscanner.

“My goal was just to do this rad track justice — go spin BAXU’s debut EP now available on all streaming platforms!”

Bat City Marquee: X-RATED