coldcut, hexstatic, kid koal and others played as part of the zen tv tour last night. a few of us from grace went along. ninjatune have been at the front edge of VJing for years. the last time i saw coldcut it had a profound impact on me and i ended up writing the essay coldcut and resistance as a result. the impact wasn’t quite so profound this time but good none the less. a stage of laptops and decks, huge projection screens, fat beats and loops into the early hourse…

zen tv tour is to co-incide with the release of the zen tv dvd. the dvd is a retrospective of artists on the label – incredibly good value. the concert didn’t actually feature a lot from the dvd though hexstatic played a few remixes – a highlight being the incredible timber (see worship trick 17).

there’s plenty of useable footage on the dvd for looping. what i wanted to suggest as worship trick 73 was a simple idea but one we have started to use at grace for making loops of video. we have got a couple of cheap dvd players (£50) but one feature of them is that you can select a beginning and end point (A/B) on a dvd and it will automatically loop. for stations or something without sound (which would probably have too much of a glitch done this way) this is perfect and anyone can set a loop going. some of my favourite videos on the dvd are natural rhythm, revolution and timber by coldcut and/or hexstatic, and what are you looking at? by funki porcini. the latter has an amazing loop of a dandelion clock being blown and then a seed floating on the wind – i’ve wanted a loop of exactly that for ages…