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Algorithmic Filmmaking Experiment in Unique New Music Video from Manchester's Shaking Chains

By: Mar. 24, 2017
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Manchester's Shaking Chains have revealed an algorithmic filmmaking experiment in a new, constantly evolving music video for their forthcoming debut 7" single, 'Midnight Oil'. Created by drummer and vocalist Jack Hardiker, with the aid of his developers Harry Moynehan and Euan Willcox, 'Midnight Oil' comes inspired by the aleatory compositions of Stockhausen and the prose of Nabokov in equal measure, offering a retort to how algorithms now warp our daily lives.

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Hardiker explains: "Midnight Oil is an experiment in algorithmic filmmaking, whereby the hermetic structures of the pop video are corrupted. It generates a potentially infinite number of self-contained films from hijacked online video, to create a transitory snapshot of the world that alters with every play. The whole world plays director.

The raw footage is selected from an evolving set of search terms. The coding repurposes the same suggestive algorithms that inform how we consume music now. Here they cannot be ignored or silenced, but act independently. What emerges is a cacophony of footage, an exponential roar of possibilities where poignancy and nonsense become bedfellows.

Search terms offer the Internet user a sense of stability and structure, building a parameter-fence to hold back the pandemonium. Yet here they are hidden, and make their own choices: there is no accurate quantification that can be made, the extent of combinations remains unknown. What eventually comes into focus is a sense of the infinite, and a new way of generating meaning from these vast, ungainly archives of human experience."

Watch 'Midnight Oil' here - https://midnightoilfilm.com/

Shaking Chains borrow their name from 'The Masque of Anarchy', a poem written when Shelley was in exile, to portray his disgust with the Peterloo Massacre and the encroaching parochialism of the England in which he fled ('Shake your chains to earth like dew, which in sleep had fallen on you. Ye are many - they are few'). More Chartists than chart hits, they are a four piece produced in The North long after production halted, currently treading water under the dark streets of London (having played music together, in one form or another, since they were at school).

In an age where groups live and die in the time it takes them to amass a student loan debt, they have stayed together, like a dysfunctional family - chained - through mutual misunderstanding, begrudging love and harrowing shared experience. They've seen the changing musical landscape gorge on itself and spew out pale imitations, enough times, to inoculate themselves from hype and ceremony. Instead, they've concentrated on their neurotic craft and sullen art. See them live in March through Salford and London on the dates below.
'Midnight Oil' / 'Drunk No More' is due for release on 7" vinyl this April 21st via Concrete Recordings. Pre-order here - http://www.concreterecordings.co.uk/shop/conc024-shaking-chains-midnight-oildrunk-no-more-7.

Tour Dates

March
25 Salford, Eagle Inn (TICKETS)
29 London, The Islington (TICKETS)

Shaking Chains are: Jack Mahoney - Lead Vocals/Guitar, Nathan Mcilroy - Bass/Vocals, Alex Solo - Guitar/Vocals and Jack Hardiker - Drums/Vocals.


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