We asked sonic maestros Golden Hum to pick some of the sounds and their associated sights that have struck a particular chord in 2012 and shaped their genre-bending aural experimentation. Golden Hum snuck up on our radar this year with a selection of elegantly crafted compositions and soundscapes commissioned for works spanning fashion and arts by directors as diverse as Steven Meisel and Lorin Askill. Their clients include Prada, Diesel and Cerruti and yes they’re as well groomed as their reel. Plug in and zone out the festive white noise.
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch
Pina Bausch’s seminal 1986 dance work “Viktor” presented at Sadler’s Wells in June of this year was a huge inspiration for us. Its the perfect marriage of dreamy dark immersive rhythms, surrealist imagery and hilarious character plots that bring to mind the work and themes of Kurt Weill, Guy Bourdin, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Ayler and Woody Allen’s “Radio Days”. This is all brilliantly accompanied by musical direction that incorporates everything from vaudeville to ragtime to gypsy folk, through to symphonic music and medieval chamber music. “Viktor” demonstrates how well curated source music as opposed to a score can act as the key narrative device in a visual production of even these extraordinarily epic proportions.
David Cronenberg and Howard Shore
We’re huge fans of Lynch/Badalamenti, Anderson/Mothersbaugh, and Fincher/Reznor, but by far our No.1 Director/Composer duo has to be David Cronenberg and Howard Shore. Shore’s soundtracks for Cronenberg’s monumental movies, Crash, Naked Lunch and Videodrome have been on almost constant rotation in the GH office throughout 2012. Our adoration for their creative efforts in the 80’s and early 90’s was one of the first things we bonded over as a creative team, and inspired the purchase of an original Videodrome movie poster hanging proudly on the office wall as a constant reminder of their collaborative brilliance.
Temple
Temple are Roberto Crippa and David Nguyen – the London based artistic direction and design team that rebranded Golden Hum and redesigned our website earlier this year. Their signature monochrome palettes, spacious compositions and sharp geometric forms matched our sensibility and creative vision perfectly. We see Temple as our visual design counterparts and good friends, plus Roberto is an amazing sound artist and musician in his own right, and regularly creatively contributes to GH compositions.
David Dean Burkhart
David Dean Burkhart is a Director, Editor and Producer, but is mostly know as the master of the unofficial music video. Plundering the tracks of indie bands featured on websites such as Pitchfork or Grorilla Vs Bear, Burkhart combines a hyper intuitive feel for mood, nostalgia and audiovisual synergy with a seemingly never-ending supply of 90’s home video footage, fitness training clips and vintage porn. The video he created for John Maus’s “Streetlight” was good, but this video for Lemonade’s “Neptune” is surely one of the most awesome audiovisual creations to emerge from 2012 –
Von Archives
VON is an artist run label interested in the intersection between moving image and sound art. Releasing limited and special edition audiovisual artefacts, VON’s archive of incredible visual and sound explorations features ambient drone and noise works by GH favourites Ghedalia Tazartes, Aaron Dilloway, Prurient and Z’EV among others. A special mention must surely go to the great American transgressive artist, John Duncan for his microscopic audiovisual study on pornography “The Tailing”.
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