The one and only Rainbo Video

Mysterious yet unfailingly courteous and prompt, burgeoning yet completely professional, Chicago born and based Rainbo Video excels at exuding excellent beats and champions  tongue-in-cheek yet thoughtful film shorts. One such short, “Colors”, silences a crowd with a masterful and eye-popping take on the pesky colorful stripes a malfunctioning television displays. Playful text appears over a seizure-inducing background of strobing stripes, entrancing all who watch, while Rainbo mixes orgasmic beats, synced live to the videos. The entire Rainbo Video show is an audio/visual delight- intelligent, fun, and all around awesome. The music is dance-fresh, the video is eye-poppalicious - all he needs now is some lingering scent to complete the experience.  Genially, RV granted Annette from HPM an interview, which sheds light on frissons, footage, and random tidbits of the man behind RV…

HPM: You use a lot of samples - how do you decide which samples will work with a song?

RV: I’m really interested in moments of “pop bliss,” those tiny fragments in a song where the melody or harmony is so enjoyable that it induces a euphoric feeling, a frisson.  So when I’m sampling, I basically focus on extracting those moments and meditating on them through repetition or various transformations.  I typically start with fragments and then fit them into whatever rhythmic grid I’m interested in at the time.  ”Xenoglossy 44″ is good example of all that.

HPM: A “frisson,” how well put! Do you identify a moment like that immediately when you hear it?

RV: Definitely!  It’s not some sort of intellectualized value judgment; it’s an immediate gut reaction.  As soon as I hear something like that, I know I like it, and I want to hear it over and over and over again, both because it’s pleasurable, and because I want to figure out why it works so well.

HPM: Interesting, do you ever feel pressured to entertain the audience with more than just frissons? Is that pressure the impetus to creating video art or is it an independent desire that you’ve managed to sync with your music?

RV: My formal background is in filmmaking and film studies, specifically avant-garde cinema.  So I’ve been making films for awhile and have always been looking to find some sort of harmony between that and my music.  My music has always been pretty fun and irreverent, whereas my films, for the most part, have tended to be serious formalist work.

Over the past couple of years, though, the spirit of my music has started to influence my filmmaking, and for the better.  While I still like my early films for what they are, I think combining an “experimental” sensibility with a pop/humor sensibility is most effective.  It offers a much more rich experience for the viewer, so they’re neither enduring some overlong, impenetrable “study in ______,” nor just mindlessly laughing at YouTube videos.  Personally, I enjoy both extremes equally, but I think integrating the two is more engaging - it asks that you watch actively, while still offering up something pleasurable.

So in that way, I think I am interested in creating an entertaining experience.  And watching a film during my performance is much more entertaining than watching me stand behind a laptop and push buttons.

HPM: In your creative process, which do you begin with first, a song or a video? How do you pair them?

RV: My current live performance is really the first time I’ve integrated music + video on a large scale.  I did a preview “trailer” awhile back that had excerpts from several of my films edited to the track “Colors,” but it wasn’t really meant to stand on its own as a true integration.

I made this current performance by first performing a live set and recording the audio.  I then took that and edited brand new video material to precisely interact with the music.  What results is a locked, silent video, which serves as the master timeline. That’s what’s being projected during the performance.  Then, each show consists of me trying to perform the music in synch with the video.  It’s really a kind of test - I have to do a lot to make it work correctly. There’s still room for improvisation, though, so it’s possible to have a performance that’s better and more interesting than the original.

HPM: Do you shoot your own footage, or do you use found footage?  Where do you find footage?

RV: Both, though for the past couple of years I’ve mainly used found footage.  I usually gather it from VHS tapes I’ve collected over the years.  For me, the disparity between the sampled content is important.  I intentionally choose content that is unrelated, and then make a kind of game out of constructing the connections.  I’ll definitely be shooting more original material, though, with a focus on employing different methods of 3-D.

HPM: What would be your ideal venue at which to play a show and who would open for you?

RV: Someday I would love to play Pritzker Pavilion at night, with a massive, 50 foot projection.  With the direction I’m taking my shows, they’ll eventually seem as natural being performed there, for hundreds of people - even families - as in an art gallery or a microcinema for fifteen people.  That kind of universality sounds unreasonable, but it’s absolutely possible.

You can catch Rainbo Video on Tour from July 24th, for the latest information check out his myspace: http://www.myspace.com/rainbovideo

For more information on Rainbo Video check out his website: http://rainbovideo.com/ and his music blog: http://www.videopopmusic.com/

Download a zip file of 5 songs here: http://rainbovideo.com/music/Rainbo_Video_320kbps.zip