‘Keep The Beat Alive’ is the current single  from Lo Five’s forthcoming album ‘Singularity’ due for release August 16th.

The clip itself is an extension of the way Lo Five duo Al Goodman and Tam Morris conceived of the song.The basic groove is drum driven almost old skool Hip Hop but combined with Al’s ‘Beverly Hill Cop’ stabs the track just cries 80s. When it came to laying some vocals down, Tam was reminded of 80s pop group Scritti Politi .

As it turned out the memory of Scritti Politi was somewhat better than the bands actual music which, to Tam at least, hasn’t dated well. So really the imagined 80s, much like the retro fitted 80s hipsters of the modern age, are better than the actual 80s. With the benefit of hindsight one can omit the fashion atrocities and cultural faux pas of the past and focus on the quirky cool.

Tam and Al call this ‘parastalgia’ (nostalgia for a past that never existed). The seed visual queue for the parastalgic  clip for Keep the Beat Alive was a photo shoot Lo Five had done. The image was the Lo five duo wearing angular sunnies, strongly back lit with a geometric concrete block wall as a backdrop. Think Devo meet Kraftwerk on Roy Orbison’s patio.

Tam is a director and animator so he storyboarded the clip with idea that the performance would be a light hearted mr Roboto romp using the same lighting and look as the photo.

“Robots became a major influence on the clip in more ways than one”, says Tam of the process of shooting the clip, “the first night of the shoot I took ‘Auteur’ to a new level. Al was not available to shoot so I shot the clip with a robot camera that I controlled with a remote while I performed in front of the green screen and recorded synch-sound and cued the song via remote on my iPad. It was just me in the studio.”

The task then remained for Tam to edit the footage and replace the green screen background with 3D moving concrete structures that would echo the off-beat dance moves the boys had performed in front of Robo cam. The result is an 80s flavoured electro piece of parastalgia from an MTV that is familiar but could never have been.

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