Watch The New Young Galaxy Video

Those of you keeping a close eye on Toy Stereo will remember that a month ago I posted the awesome video for Young Galaxy's Blown Minded. It's rare that a music video actually enhances the music it's there to advertise; however, it was my opinion that the video for Blown Minded had managed to do just that. The music and the visuals work together perfectly in a sort of audio-visual symbiosis. Alas, this is not the case with the bands latest video for Peripheral Visionaries. The track itself is great, but unfortunately the video ruins it. Deliberately animated lo-fi, it seems more like a homemade "unofficial" video that an avid fan would post on youtube. When you compare that with the painstaking effort that went into the making of Blown Minded, it just seems, well, crap. Maybe I just don't get it.

Watch Young Galaxy's Latest Video

Blown Minded is the latest single from Montreal's Young Galaxy, and it's video is one of the best I have seen all year. The idea was crafted by filmmaker Carine Khalifé, and she describes her technique as follows:

Basically, my technique was to paint on a piece of glass fixed to a light box. I would paint on the glass with oil so that it wouldn't dry, and I could play with it for hours.
A camera, fixed overhead above the animation table and plugged in my computer, would capture my paintings frame by frame and create the animation using the software Stop Motion Pro (the aardman studio software). This process took place inside a dark room so that there wouldn't be interference or changing lights on the paint.

Spending the last months in the dark room, with the light box, projecting blue, red or yellow lights on the white walls of my studio was an intense experience.
And now that it's done, it's a bit like waking up from a dream, and as the film is now getting out of my studio, I rediscover it with new eyes, almost as if I didn't do it myself.

The video works perfectly with all the texture and depth in the music. But the clincher for me is the spacey Vangelis-inspired lead synth - it gives Blow Minded that classic Blade Runner-style ambience.

Shapeshifting is out now on Paper Bag Records.