Den Sorte Skole
Different Locations (2013
—
2017)
Den Sorte Skole is a Danish turntable collective famous
for its digging and mixing abilities. They have a distinct
ability to create a holistic unity between samples, creating a
cinematic experience. For their third album “Lektion 3”, they
decided to take the sampling to a whole new level, with thousands of small
sample bites from over 250 albums from all over the planet, they created an
eighty-eighth-minute-long, poetic journey.
Lektion III A/V Tour
The Playhouse (2015)
We instantly fell in love with the music and its thematic
soundtrack feeling and decided the concert audience should be the hero of this
journey. Using a famous cliché in storytelling and; the
'Mono-myth' created by Joseph Campbell, we divided the set into
twenty-three different universes. As the concert progressed, each spectator
would be the main character in the journey, creating their narrative and
personal relation to this unique Audiovisual experience.
The visual concept was to use a variety of media types
and artistic techniques, to match the diversity of the samples in the
album. This resulted in everything from classic cardboard stop motion,
hand-drawn animations, custom-designed totem poles, classic sixties projected
oil visuals, 300 hand-painted landscapes, digitally generated star clusters +
millions of sand particles and old-school computer game graphics.
Indians and Cowboys A/V Tour
Store Vega (
2016)
For Den Sorte Skoles’ next exploration Dark Matters
decided to follow in their tracks and make a complete sample-based visual universe for the 'Indians & Cowboys tour’.
3 Dogmas were put in place for this concept:
• No effects or other manipulations of the original
material
• Each song needed at least 2 different films with no
relations.
• No movies after 1985 (ok, we made a few exceptions).
Scavenging through endless old animations, education
films, home videos etc. the result ended in a completely new and unseen
universe. Everything from the first dancers in the world captured on film, a
trip over the Inca pyramids with chanting Indians, wireframe animation through
an experimental sea of paint, a wedding in Iran with a ghost and an English
nobleman and a train trip from the open landscape on a distant planet to the
heart of a lost love.
Roskilde Festival
Orange Stage (2017)
A custom-made audiovisual show tailored to the legendary
Roskilde Festival main stage, Orange Stage.
Proceeding with our running concept of thematic
world-building, we left Earth and went to space. The big stage needed a big
concept: a massive invading demi-god going through different faces. Birth,
growth, destruction, death, resurrection, duplication and finally an invasion,
were used as the main forces of our lonely protagonist.
Over 100 participants were part of the production; guest
musicians from around the world, 12 dancers and a 22-people Icelandic choir.
The show ended Friday night of the festival, with 50.000
people experiencing this once-in-a-lifetime extravaganza in the pouring rain.
The show received critical acclaim, with Danish newspaper Berlingske Tidende
hailing it as “one of the most important cultural manifestations in Roskilde
Festival history”.
Credits
Lektion 3
Staklenih & Formula Dub:
Animation and design by Aske Melhof
Did you ever:
Handmade oil visuals by Kristian Nihlen & Stöjs.
Fai Yen: Drawings by Nicky Grünfeld
Hürel:
300 handpainted acrylic paintings by Bente Giandrup Fabian
Gowla/Island Girl:
Animation & design by Egor Jagunov
En lille en:
Processing star clusters by
Claus Rytter Brun de Neergaard.
Music:
Den Sorte Skole
Light Design:
Frederik Heitmann
Sound: James Hancock
Indians & Cowboys
SAMPLE CREDITS
L'Idee - Berthold Bartosch (1932)
Cabaret - Ideya Garanina (1981)
Afterlife - Ishu Patel (1978)
War criminals - Soyuzmultfilm Studio (1939)
Cineforms - Andrzej Pawlowski (1957)
Czar kółek - Kazimierz Urbanski (1966)
Podróż - Daniel Szczechura (1970)
Dansa Serpentina (1900, Anonymous)
Divine Fate - Ishu Patel (1993)
Franz Kafka - Piotr Dumała (1991)
Kerjus - Rein Raamat [1985]
Linn - Rein Raamat (1988)
MOTO-GAZ - Kazimierz Urbański (1963)
La faim - Peter Fouldes (1974)
Pintura 62 i 63 - Ton Sirera (1962-63)
Sciany - Piotr Dumala (1988)
Painters attack - Piotr Kamler (1966)
Foules - Robert Lapoujade (1960)
I go seek - V. Fessenko (1992)The mermaid - Ivan Aksenchuk (1966)
The Glass Harmonica - Andrei Khrzhanovsky (1968)
Phaethon: syn solntsa - Vasily Livanov (1972)
Picture in your mind - Philip Sapp (1948)
Sentinel of silence - Robert Amran (1971)
Conservation: Waterfall - Dannis Roshay (1969)
dances of the kwakiutl - William Heick (1951)
Radiance: The Experience Of Light - Dorothy Fadiman (1979)
#18 Iran - Watson Kinter (1963)
Wild Men of the Kalahari - C. Ernest Cadle (1930)
Operation X-70 - Raoul Servalis (1972)
The Ravishing of Frank N. Stein - Georges Schwizgebel (1882)
Free Radicals - Len Lye (1958)
The Last Trick - Jan Svankmajer (1964)
#42 New Guinea - Watson Kintner (1957)
Here and There - Andrzej Pawlowski (1957)
Somnambulists - Mieczyslaw Waskowski (1958)
Jubilee - Vladimir Tarasov (1983)
Zbigniew Rybczyński - Zupa (1974)