GREED
By Earp Lug on March 14, 2026 1:53 pm
I've been listening to a lot of Bull of Heaven, and I was interested in utilising some of the techniques that I've found in their music. I guess if I was truly trying to rip them off, I would make it 37 hours long, but there are other techniques that I find fascinating about their work that I wanted to explore in this piece instead.
The music is comprised of three elements that I faded in and out to tell an abstract narrative.
The first is a recording of my TD-3 being controlled by a Korg SQ-1 sequencer with the sync tied to the LFO output of my Stylophone CPM-DS2. I connected the output of the TD-3 to the external input of the DS2 and used the internal delay and reverb to make the sounds a little more ethereal and spacey. I also added one of the DS2's oscillators to the mix and linked it to the second internal LFO, with a more basic sine wave shape to add additional texture.
The second track plays underneath the whole song, and is comprised of me playing a really slow-tempo arpeggio on my MicroKorg with really long attack and release. I selected different notes as they felt good to me, and cut out a considerable portion near the end so that it would fade out with the last note I hit.
The third track is from another session I recorded with Finding Focus last week. He was playing his OP-1, and I had a few different synths doing various things, but what I wanted was the isolated track where I had the same setup as the first track, except I had increased the speed of the LFOs on the CPM-DS2 to be quite high, making the synced tempo of all the other elements something like 200 BPM (I don't really know the actual BPM, but it was almost to the point where the hardware stops accepting it as a click track and instead thinks it's digital noise, and stops responding entirely.) The sequence was interesting, but then I turned up the resonance on the two DS2 oscillators and it sounds like a poppy bass kick.
Finally I faded between the first and third tracks so the first would be totally gone by the time the third was fully in, used keyframes to bring the second track in and out to support the piece, and I called it good. I kinda rushed the whole process because my position was bumped from Production Designer to Associate Producer on the low-budget indie I've been working on, and I had a LOT of work to do while we filmed this week.
For the visuals, I started the sequence with footage of the first set I've ever designed (for said indie movie), this kind of caged in area in a warehouse. I walked around with my new Kodak Charmera getting the long take you see at the beginning, and then I sped it up in post to align with the music and used the Luma Key effect to make the white light of outside fade to the next shot.
The next visual is footage from my car dash cam driving at night. While I was driving, I had the idea that if I overlayed a second clip on top of itself and rotated it 180 degrees, it would create a visual sort of like a hyper low-budget version of that one sequence from 2001 A Space Odessey. It came out a little different than I expected because I didn't realise that hills would affect the horizon line as much as they do, but I loved the effect.
The next visual element is footage of me spraying myself in the face with water. I told my wife that I was going to waterboard myself and I needed her to hold a flashlight and camera (Sony Handycam HDR-260v) while I did it, and she was surprisingly down. Fortunately we got it on the first take, as I still feel it in my sinuses a day later. I tinted the video red, added a second video under it that is tinted white, and used the brighten opacity for the bottom layer and the difference opacity for the top layer with the colors inverted in order to get the face shot to show up over the driving shot. I then animated the keyframes of the video to move over the driving footage.
The final visual element was some behind-the-scenes footage I shot on set yesterday on my Kodak Charmera. When I envisioned the piece, I forgot that there was sort of a third act in the song where tracks one and three fade out, and it's just the MicroKorg playing out for like 40 seconds. I wanted the driving footage to end when the acidy-sounding music ended, and I felt like the finale of GREED in society is when we live in pure artifice and turn the world upside-down, so it felt fitting. I was stoked about the match cut of the zebra working so well, and the sequence fit the music as well as I could have hoped. I faded out the last shot of the desert flipped upside-down by animating a Luma Key.
Overall I feel quite happy with how this piece came out. It's arguably more experimental film than music video, but it conveyed the abstract narrative that I was hoping to on a much deeper level than I thought I could get away with for only spending like five hours on it this week.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)
