Vid: 4'33'' by Quinara (Crosspost from 01/04)

[quinara]

One last crosspost of my vid. Sorry for the spam!

So, John Cage's 4'33'' is a piece of music made out of silence - or more specifically ambient sounds. It was released as a single last December, in a bid for the Christmas No. 1 in the UK (hoping to beat the latest X Factor winner, like the re-release of Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name did in 2009), under the name Cage Against the Machine. It came with a number of 'mixes' - different people's versions of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient sound, of which Fake Blood's Needle Drop Mix was one, building a piece around the sound of a vinyl record player just on the verge of playing something.

For some reason I thought this would make a great vid. Why, I don't exactly know, but I was charmed by one of the charities the single supported being the British Tinnitus Association (my tinnitus isn't incapacitating, but as a thing tinnitus needs waaaaay more awareness than it has). As a music fan I'm also always up for anything that challenges the definition of what that funny old medium actually is. So, I wanted to create a vid that treated essentially 4'33'' of static as music, linking audio and visual stimuli as much as anything traditional.

But! I also wanted (which is possibly stranger?) to make a vid where you could turn the sound off and it would still be 4'33'', hence my inclusion of text and (dare I get really wanky) my attempt to build some sort of language out of a relatively restricted number of clips. It may or may not have worked...

TL;DR: This vid is strange, but you can hopefully still watch it with the sound off. It comes with a free poem...? Warnings for discrete flashes and a lot of juddery cutting. Otherwise it's fairly gloomy in mood, but with nothing more ratings-worthy than a rat. And those strangely made-up cuts on Spike's chest from Lessons. If you feel like it, I'd recommend watching with the lights off and in HD / having downloaded the file.

4'33''

in the dark / sometimes / i hear you

[BtVS + John Cage 4'33'' (Fake Blood's Needle Drop Mix)]
[Sunnydale High Basement, Early S7]