‘One Snowflake’ is a spoken word poem to music, using a Fender Rhodes and an Indian drone instrument, the shruti box. The video is a collaboration with Nick Duffy which explores the nature of performance in short films. It started out as an experiment on a mobile phone a few years ago. I wanted to see how good the video quality was so I put on one of my favorite obscure 60s songs, Flowers by Ferris Wheel (impossible to find on vinyl), and danced away.
Just recently I found this bit of bogus footage and we decided to play with it. We filmed the sequence onto tape and put it back onto digital which altered the texture dramatically. We also extracted the music. It was interesting at this point because without without the blended synchronizaton of motion and music it became more documentary in style, a sort of memory from the past, rather than a dance. The mood changed to something more haunting and nostalgic without the music.
This disjunction between the dancer and the music creates a feeling of two places in time; past and present, and induces a feeling of memory and nostalgia as if looking back at the footage at a later time with reflective eyes and observing this lost fragment of happiness from the past.
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Minko Music 