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Wikipedia on Concrete TV:
Concrete TV is a public access show in New York City aired on Channel 67, combining violence, sex, pornography, new video, old video in a video collage artform set to music. This half hour program is produced by Ron Rocheleau, known as "Concrete Ron." It is shown Friday nights at 1:30 AM. Episodes are heavily thematically based in 1980s video, hearkening back to the early MTV days, in a mash-up art style.yatta:
Looks like Fleshbot and BoingBoing have found Ron Rocheleau's Concrete TV, perhaps my most favorite show on MNN ever. Created on two VCRs with worn out "Record" and "Pause" buttons, it was The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin channeled through video (I think he's moved on to digital tools since I last saw him.) It was collage that could make Nam June Paik quiver. It was montage that could make Eisenstein cry. It mixed good porn, bad movies and even badder music videos in a way that made pre-ritalin MTV look like the work of hacks. Concrete TV was mashup before most of those folks were out of grade school.Concrete TV website (Episode 9 up now in Quicktime)
Episode 8, part 1: [YouTube]
A gem from Manhattan Public Access Cable. The "fast montage of clips" is a staple of art world video (for some reason everyone who does it, and there are hundreds, thinks no one has ever "deconstructed" TV before) but Rocheleau, whose only brush with the art world that I'm aware of was a video window at Cristinerose's West Broadway gallery, is consistently the hardest, fastest, meanest, skankiest, and most relentless of the lot. He's been at this for a decade and a half. He has great comic timing and between bits fills the screen with endless-seeming montages of car crashes, exploding heads, and booty-shaking strippers. All set to a constantly pounding score of rock, hiphop and techno. It really is the ugly essence of American pop culture. An opinion: one reason it would never fly in the galleries is, it's too blue collar and "male." Too honest about about what the state of the culture is really like, in other words. Also, in fairness, it's probably best encountered channel surfing in the dead of night, not on a monitor in a gallery.
Cassie - "Me & U" [YouTube]
The "U" in the case of this video is Cassie's image in the mirror, for whom she sings, mugs winsomely, strips off her shirt, and pours POWERAde on herself in this immortal tribute to narcissism.
I post it as a basis for comparison to Brains' grime-y remix of the same tune (which you can hear on his MySpace page). He slows down the tempo to near-Romilar level and adds drum and bass burbles, videogame stings and a general all purpose bending of time and space. I envy his production skills and the full, liquid sound he gets--blowing out the car speakers bass notwithstanding. The hyperactive annotations to the Cassie lyrics are by London's m.c. Scorcher. Check it out.
More Brains here.