“Beach Vacation,” the fourth single from my upcoming (fourth) album is out now with a generative music video. I’m NOT talking A.I., but old school generative art where the artist creates the system that creates the art. That artist is one of my oldest friends, Peter Toh of PTOH Studio.
You can generate an instance of the lyric music video here, it’s never the same, and works on any size device:
“Beach Vacation” generative lyric music video
I’d love to hear your thoughts about your experience with it.
(If you have a very slow internet connection, it could take a minute or two to load before you can press play. More about its creation below.)
Luke Temple produced the recording. I wrote “Beach Vacation” on four bass-notes, and as a band we worked out the groove live at Altamira Sound in Alhambra, with Steve Marion (Delicate Steve) on guitar, Doug Stuart on bass, Kosta Galanopoulos on drums, and Luke with the drum machine and later synths. As with most of this album, I recorded my vocals later at home. Here’s a link to listen to and save the song on various online platforms (my current favorite is bandcamp).
Back to the video: I asked Ruby Caster to shoot some iPhone footage with me at the beach. I’m obsessed with this video she directed for Miya Folick. We were just winging it and didn’t have time to plot out a whole video, so I sent the footage to Peter and asked if he could use it to make a lyric video that referenced karaoke videos. A few weeks later Peter wrote to say that instead of working in video editing software, he wrote the whole thing in code, and he invited me to join the github repo, just like old times (two years ago) when I was working for him. His web app/generative art piece was a better fit for the song than I could have imagined!
The song is about childhood memories and the strange effect when you reflect on the history of your thoughts, of time collapsing in on itself. Each time the “Beach Vacation” music video is generated, the order of the footage is different, creating new combinations of lyrics and images, and which part of each clip is played, and the way it is rendered onto the screen changes as well. To me, the effect mimics the fragmentation of my memories, my uncertainty surrounding them, and the frightening reality that I’m changing them every time I revisit them.
