"Tell Me Something" – Analogue Vibrations in Perdurabo's New Video

Analogue filmmaking continues to be alive as more musicians find beauty in the raw, gritty yet fleeting aesthetics of the 35 mm moving image. This time, filmmaker Davide Arneodo collaborated with musician Perdurabo & Shramm for an atmospheric visual story of skies, seas, mountains, and open roads.

Hi Davide, thanks for being here with a stimulating project! You shot the new Komponent video, a Perdurabo’s collaborative EP, entirely in analogue. What has fascinated you? Why this choice, instead of using secure means like digital?

Hi Lomography, it’s a pleasure to be here! Komponent is the project I’ve been working on over the last years as Perdurabo that touched me the most, it totally changed my perception and approach to electronic music production. It's a collaborative EP that I created over three years in Berlin together with Shramm, a.k.a. Jörg Wähner, Apparat drummer and Roman Rappak, Breton frontman.

After all these years spent working on the production at Funkhaus, former Rundfunk der DDR, radio broadcasting organization for the German Democratic Republic (GDR) – an incredible place full of energy – I desired to keep a similar approach to the video as we did before in the musical part. All the tracks have been mainly recorded and produced in analogue, in this studio that instantly catapults yourself in another era.

That's why I wanted to capture the same energy, but most of all to "get my hands dirty" in doing it, not outsourcing the work to someone else, I really desired to be myself creating something visual for the first time, just following a vision like I did years before starting the project with Jörg. If you listen to the tracks you can feel that everything has been recorded with analogue gear, there's an acoustic and electronic warmth that wraps you, so I wanted that the video could generate that kind of sensation, the same kind of imperfection that permeates the entire EP.

When I discovered the LomoKino, I liked its complicated simplicity, its fragility, the idea that I didn't know exactly what could come out from a 35 mm film roll and despite having the atmosphere clear in my mind, there was going to be a high percentage of a wild card, making the experience even more exciting. And then the word LomoKino, composed by the terms Lomo, with a Russian influence and Kino, that means cinema in German – perfectly fitting the Berliner pro-Soviet Funkhaus' atmosphere and with the booklet graphics by Mad Johny (Aga Slusarczyk).

What was the approach to LomoKino? Where did you shoot?

We shot in France at Lac du Mont-Cenis, age-old historic location with incredible energy. The track we chose was "Tell Me Something", so we needed to re-create a lunar atmosphere, rarefied, that could match with this melancholic and blurred song. The day helped us a lot because we were literally immersed in the clouds, but nature surprised us because even if we knew it was going to be really cold and we were prepared for it, frost and wind were devastating. This aspect didn't help so much, in fact in addition to being my first experience with LomoKino, the climatic conditions made really difficult to change the film rolls and to check that the machine would be ready to shoot again – I don't deny that at the end of the day Ana Bravo – lead and precious tech support – and I looked at each other asking ourselves if we effectively shot something useful amid all the fuss.

How many film rolls did you use for the realization of the video?

Thanks to your advice and a few tricks I discovered gathering information on the web (thanks Satomi Sugiyama!), I knew that from a 35 mm 36exp film roll I was able to shoot in between 7 and 15 seconds, based on how fast I was going to turn the advancing crank, but one thing is the theory and one other is the reality. When the wind can reach 100 km/h and the frost blocks your hands everything becomes more difficult, so we had to deal with a stuck rewinding wheel, a completely blurred lens, and a few other technical problems, who have been solved after quite a few moments of desperation!

We shot in between 19 and 21 film rolls whilst to make the lunar effect I used
Lomography Color Negative 400 with a constant f-stop set on f11 so all that white light refracted by the clouds creates a suspended sensation, with desaturated pastel colors and a more evident grain.

We here at Lomography were thrilled about the video, we can sense strong vibrations. Grains and light contrasts give a vintage effect like no other. Tell us which message you want to give to your audience, what kind of emotions you would like to impress people with and do you believe that all this beauty will impress also the younger generation?

I think so, there's actually a rediscovery of analogue, just look at how many young guys add vintage filters to their mobile phone's digital photos on Instagram, trying to make them dirty, to make their snaps alive.

“What fascinates me about analogue is that often from technical limits are born creative solutions, there's a manual aspect for which our brain is forced to work in a different way, so creativity is gained accordingly. Not always to make something easier helps from a creative perspective, actually, it standardizes, it flattens everything – it's the search for a solution to a problem that distinguishes a human being from another, a creation from another.”

It's a very romantic and simple video compared to the complexity of digital graphics, that I find very interesting as well, but with this work, I simply desired to draw a world, a silent universe that could fit the musical one and I think I got it. After all, as human beings, we feel the sound and light through the perception of acoustic pressure and electromagnetic waves, energetic physical phenomenon. That's exactly what I hope this video will give the audience and younger generation: analogue vibrations.

Thanks, Davide for sharing us this awesome experience with LomoKino!

Follow Perdurabo on his Official Site and also both on official social channels: Facebook and Instagram . Finally, stay up to date with the Perdurabo's music and listen to the new songs directly on Spotify.

2019-02-22 #news #people #videos #music-video #lomokino #perdurabo