Low Fidelity

I like the sound of tape hiss. It’s warm and fuzzy. I like it when you fall asleep on the couch watching a movie. And when you wake up, the tv’s gone off and your left with a warm blanket of pixilated static (but not like in Poltergeist, that would be bad). There’s just something comforting about analog artifacts. Sometimes, with music, it helps blend everything together. Make it mushy. Like cake batter before the cake. It works in movies too. I loved how in Grindhouse (the movie by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez) they went to great lengths to make it an authentic tribute to B movies and exploitation thrillers. Right down to all of the fuzzy, out-of-focus camera work and stray hairs on the projector lens. My pal Matt Parker makes movies. He let me watch some cool exploitation style trailers that he tacked onto the front of a short horror movie of his called “Hack”.


I dig all of the after effects, the coming attractions, 70’s movie styling, the funky music and the foley sound work. It all makes me feel like I’m back at the drive-in. This is just stuff Matt does for kicks, he also edits video professionally (www.mattparkerproductions.com). Matt is working on a music video for Earwig. It’s a lot of rough live footage that I collected over the last year cut together to the song Used Kids. Matt has a great eye and he’s a very talented cat. It’s coming out better than I had expected. Some of the footage is well shot, glossy, bright and clean. While some of the other raw video I gave him is pretty low quality. Matt found a theme to tie it all together and used filters and other effects to get the footage to all work well as a video. He sacrificed the quality on the pristine footage to give it all a lo-fi feel. There are a few other neat tricks too. I like it. I’ll post the finished video here as soon as it‘s ready.

I like to write. But staring at a computer screen too long hurts my brain. The internet is digital and harsh. I think that coffee in the morning must be somehow analog. The more coffee I drink, the longer I can stare at the computer screen. They seem to almost cancel each other out.