Midway through the preview screening of her video Probably Better Than Bonham, artist Bridget A. Moser pauses the tape and looks quizzically at the gathered few.
“Did I cut off a piece of my own hair and tape it to my face to make my handlebar moustache? Yes I did.”
The video pits the artist against the spirit of legendary Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham as she attempts to prove that she is the superior musician. The piece fits uncomfortably in the tradition of early Dadaism, minus the conscious attack on the institution. When asked about her motives, the cryptic Moser offers: “I wanted a platform to showcase my preternatural talent. That is all.”
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0 Comments | Posted by: ali on Sunday December 02nd 2007
During a break in a North Eastern USA tour, Ali and friends Marc St. Louis and Tillie Perks found themselves staying at a secluded mansion in rural Vermont. Ali used the down-time to shoot this music video for the Flames! track, “So Phallocentric”. The budget ran a little under $20 and the entire video was shot using the built in Apple iSight camera and a 1-megapixel digital still camera. Skillfully edited and over-saturated, this no-budget masterpiece successfully evokes the introspective sunny suspension so characteristic of the dog days of summer.
0 Comments | Posted by: Sebastian on Sunday November 25th 2007
Not sure why I’m putting this up. Been sifting through the old files, and well, came upon this.
Edmund Lam, Heidi Donnelly, Rick Coluccio and myself, Ali Rahman comprised, arguably, A Vertical Mosaic’s best incarnation. During this late-mid-point in our career we were halfway between an electronic and acoustic band, halfway between pop and noise. There was strength in straddling dichotomies. This 10-minute opus oozes with drippy synths and cracks under jazzy drumming. I can’t remember what this song was called. Ed pretty much wrote the basic verses, asked me to come up with spacey poetic lyrics. I was listening to a lot of Built to Spill at the time so I remember my lyrics being a lot like “Randy Described Eternity“. Anyhow, still have a soft spot for this tune. It’s weird and long and bold in a way that was only really allowed in that post-rock era that had it’s crescendo sometime around 2002. Live footage shot by Sarah Taylor, grass footage shot by Ali Rahman. Editing by Ali Rahman.
This is the first in a series of episodes featuring the adventures of the Mysterious Question Marks. This podcast was recorded and produced in it’s entirety at Digital Bird Studios production facility.
0 Comments | Posted by: Sebastian on Friday November 16th 2007
By Ali Rahman, Seb Speier & Darren Ortiz
(Unfinished) 2004
Until the computer age, narrative form has always been the standard for communicating and sharing knowledge and ideas. Facts were imparted in the form of a storyline complete with characters, climax, and a moral. Now, we are having to become accustomed to a new form of storytelling…the database.
The storyline is non-existent in a database driven world. Information is presented in a non-linear format where one bit/byte of info bears no more significance than another. The database and narrative formats are forced to live together in our world yet are in direct juxtaposition with each other.
Nonversations seeks to address the opposition between database and narrative, in the context of the electronic age. It does this by directly challenging the concept that a story/information cannot be told in both a database and a narrative format at the same time. Nonversations is a storyline complete with characters, plot, subplots, etc… yet is presented in a non-linear database format.
Our story is set in an apartment complex, inhabited by the various archetypal characters. Each character has been written with their own individual back-stories, and each into a larger unspoken narrative.
The form of the videos is designed to reflect the scattered and fragmented nature of the postmodern experience. They deliberately distort traditional perceptions of time, identity, and interaction. They abstract the experience of the characters until they turn into nothing but scattered, dichotomized data bits. These characters hardly know themselves let alone each other. They don’t really care about each other, they couldn’t really give a damn about what the other is saying. They aren’t really having conversations, they’re having “nonversations”.
Note: Nonversations was never finished. Many interactions are inactive. That said, it was a tremendous endeavor. Writing a non-linear script required two hundred pages of notes alone. Execution of the project with a two week timeline taught us a great deal about logistics, casting and pre-production.
