Tag: Gary Numan

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Daily Video, Gary Numan, I Am Dust

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This video, for I Am Dust from Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind) by Gary Numan, was made using a Tachyons + video glitch synth in combination with a HI-8 camera and a CRT television to simulate grainy VHS-style images, and no computer post-production was used.

(VHS: those tapes we all used back in the pre-DVD pre-DVR dark ages, when the enjoyment of a significant chunk of popular entertainment depended on the continued strength and resiliance of fickle, degenerating magnetic tape and VCRs we had to set by hand and then hope no-one changed the channel while we were out. We also had to fix mangled cassettes with our pens and carry our CIRCUS magazines home from Tower Records uphill both ways in the snow.)

Anyway. It’s a good song, grimy and aggressive and shimmering with industrial menace.

Gary Numan 'I Am Dust'

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Gary Numan, Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind)

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gnsplinter

There are times when I wish I could transmit the experience of listening to body of music for the first time whole and complete and unfiltered, so that y’all could experience it just as I did.

Because if I could, all of you would be able to stand with me on the subway platform on a crisp cold sunny morning, half-asleep and surrounded by other commuters, while the initial notes of I Am Dust, the first song from Splinter (Songs from a Broken Mind) by Gary Numan rolled over us like a grimy tide coming in. They’re darkly seductive and a little bit intoxicating, like heavy sweet aural smoke.

And perhaps, as I did, you all would smile into your scarves and let the dark tide pull you under.
 

 

Here’s what I think about Splinter, now that I’ve listened to it a few times: it is a dark, dense, contemplative record, rigorously constructed and at times a little chilly. A candle-lit cathedral with broken windows. It is gloomy, but pleasingly so.

And while the slower songs – and there are several – are lovely, the places where the lights that shine most brightly through the gloom are the club bangers, like Love Hurt Bleed:
 

Gary Numan - Love Hurt Bleed

 

Note: there is a remix competition going on for Love Hurt Bleed through November 25, 2013. Get on that, producers in the audience!