Defusing Beck

Words: Sandy Hunter

One of the more interesting music DVDs to surface of late is the Beck Guero limited edition DVD created by D-Fuse to coincide with the release of Beck's new album of the same name. D-Fuse is known for its VJ-based abstract motion and film work and seems to have relished putting together the 30+ unique videos comprising the disc's content. There are a couple of "standard" music videos hidden as Easter eggs on the disc ("E-Pro" by Shynola and "Black Tambourine" by Associates In Science) but the true hook of this release is the 5.1 surround mix by Elliot Scheiner and the multiple and mixable video streams created by D-Fuse. The London-based visual collective used the DVD format's sub picture stream (most often used for subtitling) to layer in alternating 8-bit samples of Beck's photography, stylized lyrics and other visual treasures. What's more, the multiple angle functionality of the format contains the varied videos that D-Fuse created for each track.

Beck picked up the group's D-Tonate_00 DVD while visiting Japan and called them in to collaborate. In a release, Beck summed up the theory behind the project with this statement: "Everyone's talking about what the future of recorded music is in terms of downloading songs and the implications of people not buying CDs and what happens to the artwork. But if you're breaking music down to where it's encoded files, you can easily put visual information into that. The artwork isn't something that's printed on the CD case, it's something that exists in the music. That's the whole concept behind the DVD."

Whatever the case, the Guero album, with its Dust Brothers beats, is solid and this is a nice visual companion. It should be noted that the advanced functionality won't work on all DVD players (especially some of the older ones) and that it will take a discerning eye to decipher the nuances separating D-Fuse's intensely abstract visuals. However, the DVD actually seems to randomly cycle through the various permutations of imagery and content, making it an ideal background visual for parties, not to mention retail outlets with monitors to feed.

www.dfuse.com
www.interscope.com
www.beck.com
www.wksound.com