Dump Run: Music and recycling come together
Naresh Ramchandani and team have created Pentagram London’s first music video. “Dump Run” is the latest single from Jesse Hackett’s first solo album – Junk – and is the world’s first video ever to be created from the graphics of a mighty PSR-110 Yamaha keyboard.
Hackett is a London-based artist who is a long-standing collaborator with Damon Albarn, forming part of the Gorillaz live band and Africa Express. He first worked with Ramchandani in Recycled/ Reborn, a video for Do The Green Thing in which Hackett used instruments he had made from scrap metal and wood to create a song.
Junk is Hackett’s first solo album under his real name and was composed entirely with a Yamaha PSR-110 which he found at a London recycling centre. The video is cacophony of keyboard-based motion graphics interspersed with live action footage of Hackett, who finds the keyboard in the dump and is gradually drawn into the instrument’s visual world.
Describing the process behind Junk, Hackett says, “Largely constructing an album using the Yamaha keyboard I found in a recycling dump was for me an exercise in creative economy limitations and recycling. The twelve animal sound pads that the keyboard featured were a puzzling feature and I quickly decided to use them as a signature tone across the whole LP.”
On the creation of the video Ramchandani says, “’Dump Run’ is a brilliantly funky song that Jesse Hackett composed and recorded on a keyboard that he found at a rubbish dump. Creatively and sustainably, it seemed like a great story for us to tell through the video.
“When Jesse showed us the keyboard, we noticed all its graphics details—symbols of lions, birds and trains, weird and wonderful musical genres, simple instructional buttons—and we realised that we could make a video almost entirely from the keyboard in the same way that Jesse had made a song from it. We took all those graphics and animated them so they danced and popped to the track, then intercut them with a reconstruction of Jesse walking to the dump, finding the keyboard and performing the song.
“At the end of the video we take Jesse into the world of the keyboard’s graphics—just as Jesse recycled the keyboard, the keyboard recycles Jesse.”
The video was shot in the recycling centre where the keyboard was originally found. The live action section of the video has been treated with a VHS filter to create harmony with Yamaha’s nostalgic graphics.
Buy Junk here.
