i think it was last august, when the sun was still pumping through the front window of les tontons racleurs workshop space in recyclart, in bruxelles. nico, maud and pierre-philippe had been there for a month already and were to remain for another couple. they had hosted a few concerts, worked on collaberations with olivier vidal (portrait artist) from canada, macloud zicmuse (les hoquets and madideas man), leo vancauwenberghe (drawings) and oliver cornil (photographer) from belgium, the italian weather ladies (my band), and now it was time to bring the wonderful suisse illustratrice, félicie haymoz (character designer on fantastic mr. fox / designer of my favorite girls in hawaii t-shirt) in for a project.
when i heard this, i set up camp outside with my nose pressed against their window for weeks straight trying to catch a glimpse of what they were doing... as the 20-floor building on the opposite side of the street crashed down, they recouperated lengths of wood and constructed an immense frame which would house about 200 5x5x5cm cubes. they then silkscreened on 5 sides of about 500 such cubes - all red and blue and green - sometimes giant drawings, sometimes patterns being screen-printed onto about 40 cubes at a time, never again to find themselves beside one another, but each to be reincarnated hundreds of times over as a building block in frames of animation.
when this was done, they attached a digital-camera to the top of the structure and the stop-animation machine was complete... feeling sorry for me, standing in the dust cloud outside, nico invited me in for a cup of tea. i took it as an invitation to invade their space and for three days i moved cubes around until i had enough material to make a music video for “bells of the morning” (taken from the album “le grand discours” by aidan, released with hazelwood vinyl plastics / roughtrade, march 2012)...
please check it out and leave a word or two :)
www.floatinghome.org
www.lestontonsracleurs.be
www.feleciehaymoz.com
