Reality 32 / Mallucinations
This is a slice of ’90s analogue-video wizardry created by my dear friend Mal Torrance, with a soundtrack that mixes many evocative electronic/techno/ambient tracks that were bubbling just beneath the mainstream at the time (I recognise the Prodigy’s “Charly” in the mix). It’s an inspired piece of VHS-born mayhem and fun entitled “Mallucinations”, showing me processed and reprocessed and multiplied.
The music was the latest from Mal’s ever-current collection. As for the video, this was a pre-digital era with no software, so it required his degree of practical ingenuity and free-wheeling creativity to achieve this in his sitting-room using just a VHS camcorder and a TV. He did it through an unrepeatable spontaneous conjuration of in-camcorder effects, the TV’s image settings, and multiplying the image by feeding the TV from the camera while the camera was aimed at the TV screen—plus much connecting and reconnecting of analogue video cables in various configurations, where they coiled like black spaghetti behind the stereo system in his and Kim’s apartment at 400 East 9th Street above the south-east corner of 1st Avenue, all dusted with that scattering of dust-bunnies and stray nickels and lost crumbs of controlled substances that always accumulate on wooden floors behind stereo systems in old East Village apartments, however often one may flit about with the feather-duster and one’s little hoover-nozzle for just such awkward corners. (3’59”)
(See video here.)