Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.
Okay. First of all, this is old. Like, it’s been in the tubes for two years now if Vimeo is to be believed. In fact, I saw this a full year ago, so it’s not even new to me. But, then again, I didn’t write for a snazzy music blog a year ago, did I? Plus I forgot about it until the other day. Plus Adam and Garrett are thoroughly accomplished designers of the graphical nature and I know they appreciate good graphics. So here it is again; the best unofficial music video I’ve ever seen.
And look, so-called “unofficial videos” are a mixed bag, to put it charitably. For every creative re-interpretation that does something interesting with no money, there’s a dozen busted-ass Lego versions and a hundred weak-ass webcam videos of college freshmen lip-syncing in a dorm room — which invariably has 340,000 view for some reason. Good videos reinterpret the music in a novel way, and since it’s just some fan doing it, s/he’s got to use whatever tools s/he has at hand.
So here. Here’s a fan video for Portishead’s “We Carry On,” a time-lapse of a hideously complex computer-assisted drawing this guy’s doing. The best part is that the video isn’t called “We Carry On Tribute” or “Portishead Fan Video,” or anything like that. It’s called “Science Machine.” That’s the name of his drawing. Meaning: he could care less about Portishead. He just wanted to make a time-lapse drawing of his own shit, and he picked the Portishead song for it because, I dunno, it was about the same length as the video. And there’s no visual that could be more skin-crawlingly disturbing than . . . some guy doing a drawing, I guess. It’s hard to express why I find it so disturbing.
Also, it seems that Portishead lends itself particularly well to fan-made videos. While I was trying to find ‘Science Machine’ on Vimeo I came across another fan video for their song “Biscuit,” and the video is just . . . well, it’s just naked ladies. And it’s, oddly, also a perfect match. I imagine we’d all expect nothing less from a video with naked ladies writhing to Portishead. I almost hesitate to link to it, since it’s clearly NSFW, but if you’re mature enough to handle the above video you’re all set to handle anything.
