#jasper baydala

[1day1coverart]

+ artist : Grimes + title : Geidi Primes (2012) + artwork : Grimes + design : Jasper Baydala

[half-a-tiger]

OLIVER COATES - “Honey”, from the album 'Skins n Slime' out October 16th, 2020 via RVNG Intl.

Video by Jasper Baydala and Joanne Robertson.

[dustedmagazine]

Kool Music—Dagobah (Feeding Tube)

Dagobah by Kool Music

Kool Music, the improvisatory electric guitar project of Jasper Baydala, floats wandering, contemplative tones out over the ether. Slow, rounded notes hang on like mirages; you have plenty of time to consider how pretty they are. Phrases unspool in an exploratory way, cutting cerebral shapes against the quiet. Quiet harmonies resolve questioning phrases, as if the artist had been wondering about something, then suddenly struck on the answer.

Baydala is a bit of a renaissance man: not just a musician, but a visual artist, writer, actor and videographer. Still, there’s no real sense of cross-disciplinary conceptualism or even, really, a narrative arc in Dagobah. Baydala listens closely to the sounds that an electric guitar can make, gives them the space to move and evolve, then moves ahead. 

Baydala dips into abrasion and dissonance a couple of times. It happens first, in the title track “Dagobah,” in which glacially paced introversion takes on the buzz and friction. (The cut, and the album, were evidently named for Yoda’s home planet, or possibly a female hygiene issue.) It happens again in “Stars and Moon,” where the tone blisters and frays, as the notes fade, though the mood remains quiet and inward looking. Yet on the whole, Dagobah hovers serenely over any hint of resistance or strife, with only an occasional squeaking string hinting at the effort required to produce the thing. 

The album strays just once from its steady focus on the electric guitar, with “Bitter Deities,” a cut that shares a name (but doesn’t appear) on a cassette from 2021. Here, temple flutes, hand drums and bit of electric bass lead an exotic dance through Eastern mysticism. It’s striking, intoxicating and entirely different from everything else on the disc. 

This album will hit the spot for anyone who’s taken by the six-string musings of Loren Mazzacane Connors or his latter-day followers, especially Stefan Christiansen. There are no flashy displays of proficiency here, just a quiet space for listening to what’s happened and intuiting where it’s going next. 

Jennifer Kelly

[ho2portfoliotilahhaken]

music video #1 - “phantom”

as halloween was fast-approaching, and we learned i could only shoot black and white for the time being, i decided to direct a short music video/visual instillation for one of my old band demos called “phantom”.

the song has only three lines of lyrics:

“can we go back to the start / listening to your favourite band / wishing we could start again”

i wanted the video to be satirical and strange - a mix of goofy humour and experimental imagery (similar to the work of jasper baydala, seen here - https://boodmoarding.tumblr.com/post/179858119794/inspiration-1-jasper-baydala) 

i also wanted to pay homage to those strange american 90s informercials, the ones with creepy old men talking to a vhs camera - so i animated some strange titles in final cut pro. 

i decided to simply playback the footage through the VHS player and record it directly since we wouldn’t be needing any colour photography for this piece. 

i did this by using a titles preset, animating a screen wipe from left to right and then duplicating + offsetting another layer of the text to give it that ghost trail look. 

we achieved that classic VHS aesthetic through shooting long track-ins using the camera’s famously slow optical zoom functions. then over the long shots, we spliced in sped up and fast-forwarded stranger, blurrier pieces of footage to give it that messy, tape-warp- effect. 

my editing workflow consisted of around 10 continuous takes of the actor (myself) lip-syncing the song, which meant we could overlay them in the timeline and cut between each shot when we felt it necessary. 

the frames ranged from mid to close up to wides, to make sure we’d have plenty of coverage and diversity to give-off that disorientating feeling to the audience. 

lastly, i wanted to pull off the classic ‘floating head’ camera trick using the simplest tools at my disposal - there’s something really funny about bad 80s editing techniQues and i wanted to remind myself how far we’ve come technologically since 1989 when the panasonic m10 first hit the market. 

i achieved this by copying layers of footage and drawing a mask around it in the effects panel before blending and feathering it into the best bits of performance.

it was fun to experiment in this way and although i haven’t found an efficient means of shooting in colour, i am still very impressed with the black and white look this camera achieved for this piece. 

it is definitely in my interest to revisit this ‘spooky’ and satirical black and white form - after all the heavy lungs shoot will consist of the band against a green screen wearing black and white skeleton body suits (see moodboard here https://boodmoarding.tumblr.com/).

making this video showed me how much fun there is to be had on a music video set. most of the ideas came about organically, spur of the moment sorta thing. it’s harder to capture those moments of creativity while shooting fiction because there are scripts, tighter schedules etc. 

this free-thinking attitude is something in want to bring to the next video. 

my next step is to find an efficient means of shooting in colour, and hopefully then i’ll be confident and skilled enough to start effectively planning the heavy lungs shoot. 

watch the final video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTuUku0QEWM

[boodmoarding-blog]

inspiration 1 - jasper baydala

an unknown filmmaker, somewhere in america, is responsible for one of the biggest booms in indie music of the past decade:

mac demarco and the vhs look.

these are stills taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bfTTeZOrs4

demarco is as independent and underground as it gets - recording all his guitar music on analog tape, drowning his vibe in chorus, delay and reverb pedals, demarco’s songs are like going through a spinny time machine where you feel like you’re in the past, but you’re also in space. on fire. and stoned. his lyrics are goofy and soppy, his stage presence live is silly - he’s always shirtless or setting fire to his nipple hair or drinking lots of alcohol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdZ-HaSK3dk

baydala clung to mac’s personality and tried to reflect his traits through the visuals, resulting in this oversaturated, heavily-manipulated explosion of creativity. the success of his work has continued to grow over a number of mac’s videos and many more underground indie favourites: http://www.eprodux.com/

i would like to apply this way of working to the heavy lungs project - manipulating the image and making that noise appear to exaggerate the band’s energy and psychedelic undertones.

[musicmeds]

Vitamin T(OPS)

video: "Destination"

Directed by Jasper Baydala; shot on location in Japan, February 2015. Taken from the Montrealers 2014 album, Picture You Staring.

goodbyes often come in waves . . . nice time in japan jjjjjj

[via Arbutus Records]

[alltomorrowmusic]

video :: TOPS - “Destination”

Montreal dream poppers TOPS have shared the video for "Destination," a highlight from last year's Picture You Staring. It was directed by Jasper Baydala and shot during the band's recent trip to Japan. Watch above.

[via Gorilla vs. Bear]

[thursdayfartseminar]

Love dis!

super!

[eforalpha]

Video: TOPS - Rings of Saturn

[lpwtf]

Grimes + Claire Boucher = Visions' ferociously playful head spaces

Grimes: Visions [Jan/2012] — CLAIRE BOUCHER SAYS she wanted the cover of her 3rd full-length Grimes recording to be “something very beautiful, and also very assaulting and violent, like the music.” She wanted the image to be zoomable — “like a Bosch painting” — and very movement-oriented. More than anything else, though, both the songs and their packaging had to be absolutely sincere. 

Boucher can certainly be candid about what she was going for musically. “I wanted to make something that reads like a symphony,” she explains. “It arches — it begins in a sort of meek but inspired way, becomes very powerful, and then becomes very sad and lonely. I want people to enjoy themselves when they listen to it, but in the end feel very distant.”

And the drawing she made for the cover definitely mines one of her main creative veins: an affinity for Mesoamerican style. “When I went to Mexico, I was actually really inspired by a lot of Aztec art. I went to the museum of anthropology and Teotihuacan. It was all so horrifying and elaborate. More similar to my own art than a lot of stuff I've seen, even just structurally, because they use lots of little images of screaming faces and strange patterns to make big elaborate pieces.” 

At the same time, Boucher says that “generally when I draw there is no concept, it's just free form, I always improvise in whatever way feels best and that's what I get.” Which sounds sort of like how she makes music too, having described a locked-in-her-bedroom recording process for Visions that involved tinkering and experimenting her way into the depths of sleep and natural-light depravation, self-isolating through the foggy and euphoric layers of her own songs.

Boucher says she usually draws during movie marathons, and that the Visions cover image was hatched with India ink, watercolour paper and “Ghost in the Shell II night, so I was thinking a lot about death and shit,” she says. “I do visual art in the same manner as music in that it's intensive, but it's not private at all. The album cover image took about 16 hours, I did it over two days. But it's weird because I was sitting in my friend's living room the whole time, so it was a much more social experience and there was a lot of feedback from my friends, and it was a bit different in that regard. At this point there is way less pressure for me to make visual art, so I only really do it out of love, whereas music has deadlines and pressures and stuff, so it's not as free anymore. It used to be the opposite.”

This is probably why the prevailing influence on the Visions pieces is very personal — “my symbols,” Boucher calls them: the penetrating eyes (or lack thereof), the writhing textures, a weeping alien, the slanted hearts, flush roses and cushy bows, which apparently she's been drawing since high school. “The eyeball was my first symbol and I use it in lots of ways all the time, but I also really like faces without eyes — which is why I'm attracted to skulls a lot. The alien head is my newest symbol. I have a tattoo of it now on my hand. It's crying cuz, I dunno, I was sad at the time.”

Whatever mindset sparked the details, Boucher's visuals are spiked with the same playful streak as her songwriting. The horizontal line of script atop Grimes on the cover says “I love” in Russian, and the two vertical lines are written in a conjured foreign tongue. “I've always been into fake writing on my art, particularly things that look kind of Japanese, because I love manga and anime poster art a lot,” she says. 

Jasper Baydala, who helped Boucher produce the packaging layout, added a few more hints of mischief. The pink block on the right side is actually the word Grimes “jokingly” copied and pasted over and over and over again — “We both thought that it looked good so we left it,” explains Baydala. (He also alludes, also jokingly, to the roots of that particular idea, apparently inspired by sharing a living space with Arbutus Records' honcho Sebastian Cowan: “I hear the word 'Grimes' hundreds of times per day.”) 

Just as he did while producing the layouts for all of the Arbutus' 2011 releases, Baydala hid a very small Ninja Turtle on the Visions packaging. And then there's the giant pink alien head. Boucher had wanted to base her design on “another album cover that she liked, and we arranged the elements of her album cover to roughly match it.” For one of her departure points from aping this unnamed record (Baydala's lips are sealed), Boucher suggested an alien head. A large-filter Google search quickly brought up the original alien head image, created by a then-anonymous artist, “who turned out to be a middle-aged man in Mississauga named Mark Khair, who makes alien heads in his spare time,” explains Baydala. “He was excited that we used it. It is a good alien head. I especially like that when we inflated it to put it on the back of the record, it became pixelated — that is the modern version of grain.”

Baydala says his favourite part of the Visions artwork is the fact that Khair's alien head is so big on the back of the vinyl. “That is fantastic. It is hard to get away with something like that, and in the future Claire will not be able to get away with anything like that.” No matter how Boucher's aesthetic ends up being affected by her popularity, Baydala puts her DIY sensibility nicely into context when he mentions the green bevelled lines he added to the packaging design. “I like the bevel because it is just like Photoshop. Maybe Grimes is distinctly Garageband.”

That said, Boucher's Visions illustrations also show her visual art arsenal shifting to much the same trajectory as her music — embracing more risk, trusting her instincts, filling out the space of her canvases with idiosyncratic tangents. When she painted the piece that became the cover of 2009's excellent Geidi Primes record, Boucher was just getting warmed up. “That was the first painting I ever really made, and one of my first 'eyeball' pieces, so it was sort of a revelatory experience,” she says. “Like, 'Oh shit, art is way better if you use something besides a mechanical pencil!' Plus, I realized that drawing on big paper is way more enjoyable and less tedious, and it looks better in real life.”

Even as her implements and materials evolve, thankfully it sounds like Boucher can't help but maintain a mind-gripping art practice: “I remember not doing a lot of other important things in favour of doing that painting.” 

Images by Claire Boucher. Story by Eric Rumble. Buy Visions from Arbutus Records. 

[blamecanadaruc-blog]

Jasper the Kool Ghost

Jasper Baydala é um nome que devemos reter para este ano de 2012, apesar de não sabermos bem quem é. Sabemos que escreveu um livro que conheceu edição numa discográfica. Na música, utilizou o seu nome próprio para gozar com o do Charlie Sheen e esconde-se sob o alter ego "kool music" quando procura fazer a sua outra música. Sabemos que é amigo de cama de Sean Nicholas Savage e que aproveita para fazer trabalhos de design e artworks, quer para Sean, quer para tudo o que gravita em torno da editora Canadiana "Arbutus". Desta vez aparece-nos como realizador do video para o projecto de David Carriere, "Paula". Bonito.

  Paula // Lover Boy from Arbutus Records on Vimeo.

Kool Music 4 // Better Get Hit Diane (I Mean You) from Arbutus Records on Vimeo.

[nextgenpop]

Home is such a strange place, a strange place to be Used to walk on my feet now I walk on my knees Roads have a way of leaning ladders on your brain Homes have a way of taking them down again I used to be a log before I was a tree When I got home, they chopped my wood for free Now I am burning, as you can plainly see To leave this old town far behind me So I waited and I waited for a road to come along And as I waited, I wrote this song And as I wrote this song, I began to cry The highway has gone and left me dry As I cried, I got paid I bought a house, a wife, a dog, and a maid That dog’s name was Broken Dream Sitting around all day long listening to it scream My house and my wife and my maid and my dog Sitting around in our home in the fog Collecting boots and books in a dark room Stacking them tall as the darkness looms I used to be a lake before I was a mother Now I got a home and a dying brother The highway is no place for someone like me After all, who’d take care of Broken Dream I watched as all around me the highways turned to dust I watched as my feet began to rust I waited so long I found track of time It was hiding in a shoebox under a pile of dimes I gathered the dimes and took them to the store I bought a rabbit in a tree and a book about floors The rabbits name was Old Photograph The rabbit looked at me and began to laugh Then that rabbit, it said to me Home is such a strange place, a strange place to be Before you were a doctor, you were a child Now you’ve got your problems arranged in a pile Before you turned green, you got a tattoo It read: Don’t let your Soul Turn into Glue Don’t you remember when you were a wheel Now your legs are made of steel Has it slipped your mind that anything goes Just reach for the sky on your tippy-toes That rabbit’s name was Land and Sea So I tip-toed through the dust where the highways used to be With poor old Broken Dream trailing behind me