“It definitely took some encouragement from Chris to bring the clothes airer onto the stage. It’s a standard clothes horse that just sounds amazing when you bow it. I use a normal cello bow and bow it across the thinner rungs; I put a contact mic onto the base of the clothes horse and that’s what picks up the sound of the vibration directly from the metal. I think it sounds so great because the vibrations travel through the whole clothes horse, acting almost like a spring reverb – the whole thing just singing away. The contact mic then goes through some guitar pedals (an EH poly-chorus, a delay and a Hudson Broadcast) and then into a guitar amplifier. If you were to hear it on its own you’d never guess the source.”
CJ Mirra
Since that initial live gig, as the COVID pandemic put paid to planned live performances, visual artists Rebecca Smith and Rob Thorogood have reinterpreted Chris’ footage to create individual music videos for the hero tracks Translate and Sans Raison respectively.
“Chris’s film footage is incredibly powerful, but amazingly delicate and elegant. It encapsulates the beauty and interconnectedness of us with the natural world. I really wanted to reflect this in a very digital way. Much of my work juxtaposes these values with an overtly digital aesthetic. I played with creating wave studies from particles, taking the idea that one single point has a ripple effect out to others. This interconnectedness is something that really interests me and runs through the film, starting with the bird murmurations and close-ups of waves. The movement patterns are very similar, and I wanted the whole piece to be a study on these.
To create the piece, I decided to experiment with particle simulations, keeping the theme of interconnectedness, and idea that the movement of one particle would effect that of those around it. Ordinarily you would do this within an animation engine such as After Effects. However, this can be a really dry process. Instead I took a different approach, using a software called Resolume, which is used for live audio-visual performance. This way I could use physical controllers (faders and dials on a midi controller) to change how the particles are reacting, or which clip is playing. It provided a much more organic, physical relationship to making the piece, and allowed me to instantly connect and react to what I was hearing in the score. It also creates a really nice workflow for the creation of the extended Translate live performance.”
Rebecca Smith – Urban Projections
Chris also created a stand-alone edit for the cover of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s track Horses that appears on the Translate album.
“We shot this back in 2016 at San Bartolome de Pinares (a small village in the mountains northwest of Madrid, Spain) as they celebrated Las Luminarias in honour of San Anton, the patron saint of animals. It’s a Spanish purification festival in which horses are ridden through bonfires lit in the streets and it continues long into the night. The tradition, which is 500 years old, was originally intended to purify villagers from the plague and protect the animals for the year ahead.
As the sun set and piles of pines are set alight, dramatic scenes unfold. More and more horses and riders appear and gallop through the streets, billowing smoke fills the streets, flames lick the horses heels and sparks hang in the air. The more daring riders charge through the pyres at full pelt scattering glowing embers, cinders and ashes.
My eyes streamed, my coat still has the burn marks and the stench of smoke stayed in my nostrils for weeks. This feels like a stand-alone sequence within the film – it’s quite visceral other worldly. I knew that we had to cover this track as I watched the footage back on my return. And, four years later, the symbolism of shooting a festival to purify livestock and villagers from the plague and setting it to music with lyrics such as; I can smell the campfires burning/But I’ll go out walking on my own/By day and night the world keeps turning/Frightened people hiding in their homes. Is all kinda unnerving and comes back to the film’s central idea of relating to the strange(r) times we live in today.”
Chris McClean
You can listen to the full Translate album HERE.
Chris and CJ plan to perform the TRANSLATE audio visual experience live again as soon as they are able, with Rebecca Smith joining them to add a layer of digital projections to the cinematic experience.
