Watch the premiere of Sewer Seed’s brain melting new video ‘Waste and Wonder’

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A few months back I was asked to make a video for a new act that my pal Randolf Reimann was involved with. He sent me a few extreme harsh noise tracks to listen to and to see if anything spoke to me, and you know? It did. The music was like being simultaneously under water, but rushing water – dense washes of sonic force, but with a sense of beauty hiding underneath. To celebrate the release I got the two heads involved to give me the lowdown, and I even threw in some words about the video process as well.

Jay Preston: old punk rocker, runs Inner City Uprising Records, plays in various bands, The Blurters, MILAT, Coffin Fly, Scrubber, Excessive Force to name a few.

I’d never formally met Randy before this adventure, he was always someone I looked up to in the Sydney punk scene cause he played in the mighty Massappeal. Anyway, I sent Randy these tracks I was sitting on of really violent, harsh noise and asked whether he’d like to contribute. I remember getting so fucking excited when he agreed to do this project. When I got the first track he recorded in my inbox and I played it I was so taken aback. Randy really added a whole new dynamic that I wasn’t expecting or used to. All of a sudden, these horrible harsh noise tracks became blended with these really beautiful sounding, mesmerising like, machine vocal runs. It went from a feeling of total Armageddon to almost dream like! Suddenly, from that second on, the process unexpectedly became totally therapeutic for me. As Randy recorded his bits and sent them back to me to listen, they began dredging up a lot of emotion and feelings. Much of it made me feel like I was in the ocean. Sometimes it would feel like I was being held down in the white wash, rag dolled across the surf, then other times I felt like I was immersed in a stunning shallow waterhole, with pristine waters as clear the day.

Randy Reimann: also an old punk rocker, he was the vocalist for Massappeal, solo projects Wolf Shield, Astro Nerodia and founding member of Tralala Blip.

When I first listened to the tracks Jay sent me, I was struck by the sheer density and power that was moving the air in my studio. it made me consider how the air interacted with the objects in the space and with my flesh. Yes this was music created by Jay and his machines some time before in some place far from my home, but my immediate experience upon listening was an awareness of the liveliness of this invisible, gaseous stuff bouncing around the space having its own life and it’s own connection to the things it touched. I imagined the life of sewer systems (as Jay named this project Sewer Seed), these environments made by humans to deal with our waste. And out of this waste life happens. I loved how inhuman this music sounded. i laughed aloud and pretty quickly plugged a mic into a modular system. Grains of my voice found place amongst this noise without me feeling like an intruder. It was quite a restful experience.

Jason Heller: MLK-ULTRA, Bono Ono, Lowest Common Denomintor etc, Cyclic Defrost contributor.

I came up with an audio responsive auto feedback system that is manipulated by me in real time as the track plays. I used two vision mixers and an old CRT TV to create the feedback system. Audio of the song was played into a video channel on the first mixer, the output then going into mixer two whose output was split and sent into channel 2 of both mixers. Once the system was working I used built in effects on the second mixer to manipulate the image. This was a very intuitive process as the system is very sensitive. After doing around 20 passes of the song, I brought all of the clips into Adobe Premiere and chose the best takes, then applied them to each other to try to match the intensity of the song. There was no actual editing during this process. All editing was done in system and captured live.

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