On Location...

I’ve been intrigued by the videos Diego Stocco puts up on der tüben for a while now, and I decided to give that sort of thing a whirl. So I soldered a couple piezo speakers to a hacked-up RCA cable, packed up my DR-2d and Silvertone, and headed up in to the Superstition Mountains for some quality time, just me and the flora and fauna of the Sonoran Desert.

Well, come to find out, what Diego Stocco does is incredibly difficult. Who knew? After a few hours getting par-boiled, I headed back to the compound and tried to piece the pieces in to a coherent whole. That’s where the trouble started. Easy enough to grab little rhythms here and there and turn them in to a song, but trying to find that specific 4-second burst of plant-drumming in a 6-minute video clip is nigh on impossible. So I threw in the towel. I made a nice long audio track, essentially a normal song, but about half way through assembling the video pieces, I ran out of incidental footage, and was pulling my hair out trying to find the specific bits that lined up with the playing. You can see that I gave up right when the cactus plucking starts.

Fade to black.

Anyhow, I have a new respect for that dude and his methodology, I’ll say that much. I’ll probably do more of this sort of thing, but I need to come up with a better workflow. Is there such a thing as a battery-powered 8-track that has some full-featured shit on it? It would be a lot easier to get the video and audio all lined up if I was able to make the whole song in the wild, rather than trying to remember what went where when I got home.

Anyone else try this? Success? If so, methods please.