A last hurrah courtesy of The Kick-About No.56 and Sandy Nelson’s percussive powers. My unrequited print and textile brain insists I do something with some of these images (“To the loom with you at once!“), but I lack the skills, stuff and wherewithal to act on these impulses!
More Kick-About No.56-inspired images, seeking to visualise the percussive effects of a Sandy Nelson drum-solo. By this point in the process, I was getting some nice effects and was enjoying all the mid 20th-century vibes.
A third set of images produced in response to The Kick-About No.56, and specifically this drum solo by Sandy Nelson. I was trying to create a sense of cymbals being struck and percussive vibrations and much fun was had in my pursuit for the best expression of that idea.
With Sandy Nelson’s 1962 12 minute drum solo as a starting point for our latest Kick-About, I wanted to respond to the divine bash and crash of it with moving images. I had a technique in mind and sense of what I wanted, but couldn’t achieve it, and not for want of trying. That said, I did identify a way to produce imagery that pressed my mid-20th Century buttons and communicated something of the vibration of Nelson’s drum kit.
My immediate response to The Kick-About No.56 was ‘make a film’, so I set about trying to find a means to visualise Sandy Nelson’s percussive effects. I built some simple 2D shapes in the video-editing software and tried to ‘vibrate’ them. I had the image of a cymbal being struck, a disc-shape producing more complex effects due to the persistence of vision. I struggled a bit, because I couldn’t get what my imagination was showing me. That said, during the experiments that led me to give up on the idea of moving image, I began to develop work for which I could muster more enthusiasm – and if not visualisations of sound exactly, than artwork that wouldn’t look too out of place on the front cover of a jazz album. More to come.
Red's Kingdom 