BILD QUILT
DVD Audio/Video project, sixteen 2min videos, 2005
From Crucial Blast:
Bild Quilt is a interesting little DVD project from the young avant-garde filmmaker Lori Felker that blurs the lines between harsh noise and psychedelia, experimental film, and digital collage art. Bild means “image” in German, and the crux of this project was to create a “virtual quilt” of original short films from Lori that are set to new peices of music that she commissioned from a variety of underground artists including Cotton Museum, Carlos Giffoni, Bradley Heiple, Intro to Pterodactyl, Leslie Keffer, Dave Kuzy, Jim Lingo, Mesaplex, Irene Moon, Jeffrey Schreckengost, Mike Shiftlet, Adam Strohm, Torus, Weasel Walter, C. Spencer Yeh, and Scott Young, with the only stipulation being that each piece of music need be exactly two minutes in length. The DVD itself is divided into four sections that basically document each step of Lori’s creative process for the Bild Quilt project: the first sectionfeatures each individual artists contributed track as an audio-only DVD track, and the second again features each track but with the addition of the two minute film that Lori created for each one using the music as her primary influence; in this part of the DVD, you can select each artist and video seperately by name. The third section of the DVD just combines all of the music/films into a randomly generated playback, and the fourth area of the DVD showcases the final product, a single screen with all sixteen of the films shown as smaller thumbnails, a “digital quilt” of sorts, with all of the audio tracks being played back simultaneously. It’s a nightmarish cacophony that, combined with the symphony of digital images flickering out from the screen, burns a hole right into your frontal lobe. Both seperately and as the finished piece, Lori’s films recall the surrealist cut-ups of Antony Balch and William S. Burroughs’, dayglo LSD hallucinations, and giallo shadow techniques, with images of deformed plush monstrosities, melting children, bizarre moving sculptures, and deeply creepy nighttime footage of weird alien insects crawling across cracked pavement, and the music moves from harsh droning electronics to strange, distorted acid synth workouts…some of my favorite pieces include “Two Way Mirror Mountain” from Dave Kuzy of Microwaves, who contributes an awesome instrumental space-synth piece that sounds like an excerpt from an Italian horror movie from the late-80’s, complete with pulsating techno beat, sweeping analogue Moog tones, and sinister slasher ambience; and Weasel Walter from The Flying Luttenbachers delivers the simply-titled “Two Minutes”, a blastbeat-afflicted bit of creepy prog rock. Comes in a regular jewel case with liner notes that outline the project. © CRUCIAL BLAST
Part of DVD Drome at the 2006 International Film Festival Rotterdam & Satellite of Love TV