The short "Eternal Something" film by Daniel Brandt makes quite an impact. The film and music resolutely capture the anxious reaction we all feel from too much freely available information at our fingertips. It sends an unforgettable and yet such an important message, especially from use and accessibility of information on social media in our current generation. The constant urgent percussion on all instruments and tritones that never relent; it's no wonder we already feel uneasy. Paired with the dark online footage that Daniel has obtained after sifting through hours of clips on YouTube it seems to in many ways show the message the minimalist label Erased Tapes normally endorses, but in its opposite duality. It doesn't allow us peace and restrain, because we can't disconnect, and so we're constantly engaging and on tenterhooks. The footage at points is very Black Mirror-esque in how it highlights the dark and negative aspects of technology and with it, humanity's influence on society.
"Sometimes it was a very nerdy and kind of depressing experience to sit at home and just go through all this crap online. I kind of got frightened by the state of the world right now, at least the feeling you get from it when you watch all these videos. So much nonsense and also so much violence and superficiality are around, it’s almost unbearable.
While I was working on the "Eternal Something" album I thought it would be great to combine these two aspects and only use footage from Youtube as a foundation of a kind of updated but much more gritty and of course shorter version of Koyaanisqatsi. One afternoon I just downloaded a bunch of clips, looking for several keywords and put the music underneath. It kind of worked and I was hooked. So over the course of the last year I downloaded extensive amounts of video from Youtube and sorted the footage in different categories and the story just evolved from trying out different combinations.
I then showed very early versions to Beaver and asked him to record a few streams of consciousness on his iPhone while watching the clips. I was very happy with the result and edited them to fit to the film and connect the whole thing." - Daniel Brandt
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