If you’ve recently smelled something smoldering in Columbia, it could be the maze of cables that link and feed the edit suite at 808 Lady St. Resigned to the recirculated air and all-to-familiar darkness of that room, editor/director/sound-designer/cine-Swiss-army-knife-incarnate Steve Daniels sits dead in the eye of an exhaustingly prolific storm, battling not only the usual Mad Monkey deadlines, but those from a string of personal projects likely to up the wattage on an already luminous body of work.
First to be released, a music video for “Still Sound”, the lead single from Toro Y Moi’s new album Underneath The Pine. To kick off his second offering under the Carpark Records banner, Chaz Bundick (Toro Y Moi) sought an organic, spontaneous affect, free of narrative constraint. Daniels, it seems, was more than happy to oblige.
“The video was free-styled all the way,” Daniels says. “We agreed it should be fun and reflect a kind of “day in the life” of Chaz dancing about Columbia, hanging out with friends, performing with the band.”
The result is raising industry eyebrows and creating the pre-release buzz demanded from an album in the digital era. The day it leaked, the video claimed front-page real estate on indie music site Pitchfork and has subsequently charted more than 38,000 views on YouTube (link to the video here). Most recently, the video and its director were profiled by the Art & Design blog The Black Harbor.
Take a peak here {http://theblackharbor.com/steve-daniels-still-sound/}, because it might be your only chance to hear from Daniels for a while. With a Heather Henson produced puppet film, Junk Palace, now in the can and final cut of his own fantasy short Dirty Silverware due at the end of the month, he’s all but welded a Do Not Disturb sign to the edit suite door.
