#german

4 posts

ATE THE MENU: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day the map ate the land
Projects 6 min

ATE THE MENU: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on the day the map ate the land

ATE THE MENU is Song 03 in Out of Your Mind, the Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. It is the one about symbols eating the substance they point at. The map became the territory. The page outranks the place. You wheel a cart of real food to the counter and grieve the thirty dollars of paper instead of the gold you are carrying home. A Bavarian governor voice raps it over Mussorgsky's Promenade re-composed into D minor EDM, with a German echo underneath. CC BY 4.0.

THE AUTOMATIC DREAM: a Bach Passacaglia EDM rap on whether you are a machine
Projects 8 min

THE AUTOMATIC DREAM: a Bach Passacaglia EDM rap on whether you are a machine

THE AUTOMATIC DREAM is song two of Out of Your Mind, a Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. Watts called this one the fully automatic model, the inherited story that you are a machine, a fluke, a glitch that learned to count. The film states the answer up front, walks through the lie and the bleak, then wakes back into the answer with the weight of having lived it. A Bavarian governor voice raps over Bach's Passacaglia in C minor recomposed into EDM, with a German echo woven underneath, a cinematic SFX layer, and a single eye that opens at the end. CC BY 4.0.

CERAMIC: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on whether you were made or grew
Projects 5 min

CERAMIC: a beat-locked Alan Watts rap on whether you were made or grew

CERAMIC opens Out of Your Mind, a new Napkin Films series built from the Alan Watts lectures. The oldest question, asked as a beat-locked spit-rap: were you made, like clay in a maker's hand, or did you grow from the inside out? A Bavarian governor voice raps Alan Watts over Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain re-composed into EDM, with a German echo woven underneath, a mind-bell jingle, and a goodbye in Bavarian. D minor into D major. CC BY 4.0.

THE SATURDAY MACHINE: takes a lot, so choose your why
Projects 14 min

THE SATURDAY MACHINE: takes a lot, so choose your why

A 3:56 napkinfilms parody-of-self music video. Italo-disco in D minor, built on top of a chipforge track and loaded up with four autotuned voices, forty German adlibs, a mordant British existentialist chorus ("takes a lot, work work work then you die, so choose your why"), a James Brown tribute shout, a Bach-arpeggio sax solo at 0:52, a disco-lit vending machine with 16-segment beat-synced LEDs, and a Plan 9 bunny who rises from the dispenser slot to wave goodbye while Rocko says "Servus" in the blackout. 132 voice beats. Nine production passes. EBU R128 loudness-normalized. Wears headphones beautifully.