Watching a music video is usually a passive experience. But this is not the case with a new vid/art project from New Orleans-based MuteMath. The band has created an interactive video mixer to introduce "Odd Soul," the first song on its upcoming third album, also titled Odd Soul.
The mixer, dubbed "Visual Stems," features six different videos that comprise parts of the song: drums, guitars, bass, vocals, synth and BG vocals. Users can mute various sections of the song (a cool tool for aspiring musicians, as you can listen to a certain part of the song all by your lonesome), check out solos and change the volume levels of each of the six videos. There are two versions of the project: one for up-to-date browsers featuring six separate vids, and one for slower browsers boasting four videos (with two parts crammed into one video).
The project was created in collaboration with Teleprompt, and was brought to fruition by graphic designer Andrew Le.
MuteMath is no stranger to inventive music videos. Back in 2007, it created a video for the song "Typical" during which the jam was played backwards.
We asked the band members if they felt any pressure to come up with increasingly elaborate videos over the years -- given their first viral foray into video-making, and the recent influx of interactive, unconventional music videos (see: "The Wilderness Downtown," "3 Dreams in Black," "Back From Kathmandu," etc).
"It's not really pressure as much as just getting bored with releasing music the same way every time," lead vocalist and keyboardist Paul Meany told us. "We find ourselves on 'what if' rabbit trails a lot. Someone will start an idea 'What if we...' And then one of us will answer, 'but then what if it...' Until we keep pushing the idea into something that is obscenely impossible, and then we go back a few 'what if's' and there's the idea we usually go with."