Gianni Arone
● Lyric videoGianni Arone4:461080p

Semina

A spoken-word track about the time zoo: rooms, tides, moons, a cat named Midnight. The words set the picture. Every line calls up footage of what it names: the moon from Méliès and Apollo, the Morse key from an Army Signal Corps reel, the trapeze from a 1901 circus, the ghost from a 1901 Scrooge. The beat does the cutting, the glitching and the color: fast runs of cuts resolve into held images that pulse on the beat.

Time Zoo
↓ Download video (MP4, 1080p) Lyrics Sources H.264 + AAC · 1920×1080 · 30fps

Photosensitivity warning: this video contains strobing, full-frame flashes and flickering color. Please skip it if you are sensitive to flashing lights.

Also: Beyond Measure, the instrumental cut from declassified files.

How it was made Process

  1. Words first. The lyrics were timed word by word against the vocal, so each word lands on screen as it's spoken, with the newest word glowing.
  2. Images answer the words. Each line has themes (moon, ocean, circus, Morse, ghost, cat, grave, stars) and draws its footage from films that show them. Every clip was checked by eye; intertitles and captions were thrown out.
  3. Chop and hold. The edit is planned bar by bar. Runs of fast cuts on the drums (footage stuttered, reversed, retriggered on hits) resolve into held images that loop a single beat and punch in on every beat, then break back into cuts. Holds land where a line names something you can see, so the image has time to sit with the word, and hard snares stab them with flash-cuts of related footage.
  4. Glitch & color. Real codec datamoshing (deleted I-frames, repeated P-frames), stale-block moshing, gradient-map color bursts on kicks, macroblock corruption on snares, and strobes on hi-hats. The words glitch and strobe along with the picture.

Sources Public domain

All footage is in the U.S. public domain: works of the federal government, films published before 1930, and NASA imagery.

Early cinema

Government film

Space & sky (NASA)

Lyrics

in any room,
there has been a soundtrack,
there have been scenes,
even when the building is destroyed,
or before it has been built,
the stage is set for
these rooms to exist,
the time zoo,
has every variety of possible potential,
of anima,
of light

Swim Inside Me
Narrate My Tides
Pulse The Reins
Hide and Seek
In The Time Zoo
Touch Tao Speak In Morse Code
Vibrate Understanding
Become Equanimity
We Are Electrical Beings
Submerged In Impossible Oceans
Hydrating Our Senses
Thirsting For More
Numbers Haunt Us
Words Taunt Us
The Idea of Us
Is A Burden
Is A Mirror Howling Moon Eyes
Raven Filled Water
Tattooing Moments
With Their Steep Sleep
Wake My Forehead
With Your Memory

the fabric of the moon
silk fibers like piano fingers
placing light in key areas
there upon glancing
in the stillness of a room
you would think that
a chord of light on the picture frame
or an accenting note
across the desk would
be rolls of cosmic dice
but there are no mistakes
only specific spotlights
on the dark stages
each sound light makes
is met harmoniously with the shadows
they orchestrate the time zoo
and play the melody of the circus
The Ringmaster created the painting
of still life in movement
abstraction does not exist
only perfect placement of
mundane majestic moments
the animalia of moonshadow
dancing across in increments
making small pirouettes
across the trapeze of time
and space
winking to you from the morse code of stars

there's a scent of a figure,
makes an 8 shape in my eyes,
small water,
hourglasses clinking together by all the forms of death,
infinity circling,
snake weavers,
it is like riding up to the horizon to trace the vanishing point,
here come the ghost wolves,
howling for a sunflower,
they say consciousness bought a time zoo,
to keep in the sock drawer of gods,
around the ages of 4 to 7 and specifically somewhere in between,

i remember finding a switchblade and a playboy in my father's sock drawer,
trying on my mother's underwear,
erotic death programs,
disassociating at Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary School,
For Hours before bed my mind would flash with superluminal strobing of horror
and pain,
the tortures displayed in technicolor were uncanny,
feel till apathy and fear were nonlinear totems used as grave markers to go
beyond intuition in crises zones,
trained for specialized permanence,
I would lay eyes wide shut in silence like the crossed hands.
No child should go through that.
My Cat Midnight,
she died,
car ran through her
we buried her around 9 o'clock in the backyard,
and then in sometime of time - past the time of 9 and certainly a bit later,
Midnight Walked Through the door,
the warm plastic bag that held her new blood and her frozen fur,
was not Midnight's,
but my tears were true,
I remember the power in petting that bag.

Suppose You'd Like That,
Timeless Moment,
You Crafted A Place To Have It,
A Mind To Know It,
Body To Feel It,
A Consciousness To Share It With,
Little Languages Of Light,
Dancing In The Dark Space,
So It Vibrates Memory,
Perhaps You Are Tired Now,
Awakenings Exhausted,
The Skipping Record,
with no needle to thread,
the silence,
The Time Zoo we,
Kept our Creation Creatures in,

Of All The Poems and The Films,
The Happy Endings,
The Sad Scenes,
The Black and White Development of Your Color Schemes,
The Missing Links,
Those Chain Letters Of Intuition,
The Fear of Letting Go,
Fear Of Holding On,
All The Love That You Never Could Place In This World,
The Disappointment of Desiring What Could Never Be Held,
The Ecstasy Of The Unspoken and Uncaused,
The Spiral Of Revelation of Sea Shores and Star Paths, Of Mountain Tops And
Canyons, Of Rivers And Of Wind,
Suppose You Were To Create A Little Light Language,
Written By A Forgetful Friend So You Might Remember

Shepherded Into All These Time Zoo's.
Systems of Organizing the Wildlife of Consciousness