Lemiscate, the 2011, self-released debut from Los Angeles musician and visual artist Vinyl Williams, is getting the reissue treatment on November 12 via London's No Pain In Pop and his own Salonismlam imprint. To psych us up, he made this architecture-themed animation for album single "Higher Worlds," which sounds an awful lot like what might happen if '70s krautrock icons Neu! asked a vocalist to sing on top of all the motorik beats and elemental guitar melodies. Complicating the found footage aesthetic, Williams passes some VHS-style filters over a homemade 3D animation, so that the result looks an awful lot like a vintage videogame even though it's an original work. Below, Williams explains what he was thinking when he made it.
"The images in 'Higher Worlds' are made up of various religious aspects to form an idea of what it looks like to experience something extra-sensory, beyond the very limited one octave of our visual spectrum. The effect is amplified by degenerative processes, such as filming my computer screen as I'm building these 3D worlds, then transferring the footage of this digital environment into an analog composite signal, onto VHS, taking the VHS machine on a roller coaster as it's laying over in real-time, to encounter natural distortions and imperfections. In a similar way, the 3D models I was working with in Cinema 4D, Google Sketchup and After Effects were such big files that I couldn't really realize the end result until an export was made, which always ended up surprising me. Through this project's imperfections and fuzz, I feel like it created itself. The video has an intense amount of exotic imagery—perhaps because other spectrums of sensation are so in-between and unknown that to express it would be to attach it to the most tropical, vast, exotic dreamscape one could ever imagine. I obviously link it to something like teal treasure temples in a space lounge rainforest."
