Our next music video premiere arrives from Prague-born, Lausanne-based hardware enthusiast Nathan Solo, the musical moniker of graphic designer Matěj Moravec. ‘Gold‘ is lifted from his recent debut album, ‘Ministry of Anxiety‘, a record made to exercise the inter-relativity of his artistic pursuits.
The video strikes as one of simplicity, at first, with a monochrome colour palette and a small pattern of shifting symbols, dots and squares present; the complexities of the project unfold after understanding a bit more about what happens on-screen when the beat kicks in. Nathan Solo’s work here is twofold, firstly in creating the music itself, and secondly in creating a typeface which is reactive to numerous elements of the music.
Very quickly those squares and circles on screen warp and shift into pointed stars and stretched ribbons, forming generative patterns that keep time with aspects of the track, sometimes clear and formative to the beat, such as the kick drum or flickering hi-hats, but often the source of the modulation is unclear, perhaps thanks to Solo’s familiar but non-linear presentation of techno, gleaned from near-ceaseless practice with his instruments.
This version of the project remains quite self-inclusive: with the core function of the graphics being a typeface, the writing itself reflects factual and real elements of the track, from the BPM to the key and titles. However, the book of possibilities has just been opened here, with the manifold applications of the typeface, such as for live audio-visual performance, made clear.
‘Ministry of Anxiety’ is out now. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
