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"Labyrinth Remixed" [2.8 MB .mp3]
Shorter, digitally rearranged version of ex-Happy the Man keyboardist Kit Watkins' instrumental prog anthem "Labyrinth" (1981). Took what I consider the "essential riff" (four variations of the same tune, plus a bridge) and jettisoned all the classical dynamics, theatrics, and buildups as well as expressive soloing. Reordered the riffs and overlayed them to make new counterpoint, thus turning a progressive rock song into a techno-prog song--kind of sped-up Philip Glass, what I always wanted to hear when I played this. Some excellent "real time" keyboard and drumming being massaged here--but I am interested in the song's "money shot"--structures of the sublime in their most compact form.
A few posts back a "wandering POV of a wandering POV" was discussed--a shaky, panning YouTube video documenting Linda Post's shaky, panning video perambulation through a cornfield. Here's another variation (thx AFC): John Michael Boling's YouTube of a video panning along a block of strip malls. The standard YouTube screen framing the action scrolls slowly from right to left using the "marquee" browser command, making its position on your screen in constant "slow and go" tension with the position of the camera's viewfinder. The video's continuous "tracking shot" is roughly panoramic, whereas the YT starts over at your screen's right as soon as it reaches the left side, creating what feels at times like an impossible folded space.
In both scenarios (James Kalm's Linda Post video isn't a piece per se but an inevitable meta extension of the Post), recursiveness is the watchword, in form (a picture within a picture) and in content: Post's video references cornfield tracking shots (from North by Northwest to Children of the Corn) and Boling's obliquely channels Ed Ruscha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip.
If we had an Adorno he might say such dual recursiveness is a distinguishing feature of 21st Century art, or at the very least Web 2.0 art.