N.O.P.R.

Walk it off.

London, where we used to live, is a very walkable city. Despite its sprawl and the sizable distances between things, it’s not easy to get bored on foot, or at least not unpleasantly so. Its streets are small and windy enough that even the most routine journey has a modest rhythm. London is old enough to humble you, and ugly enough to thrill.

This is how most of our work has been worked out and fine-tuned. We would film a lot in the street. Approaching things from afar, getting up close and moving on. In Swoon Soon there are no streets, but there is a circle. This is what we said about it at the time…

One girls saunter from early 90's Chicago through to Croydon in 2 years via Berlin yesterday and that one good street in Paris. And most other places. On her way she encounters: soft-focus council rhomboids and nouveau pagan triquetras taking refuge from distinctly average weather, velociraptors in leisure-mode and Wimpey homes made entirely of misspellings.

At the time, we were thinking about how a lot of company logos bore a resemblance to much modernist design, and how the former was a good deal less remote. We don’t just mean the big corporations, but also the branding of a small health center or a regional recruitment agency, that sort of thing. We found dozens of huge books full of these logos, each stickman so stunningly similar to the next, that a kind of re-abstraction took place. We were also looking at logos on record sleeves, which is where the girl in Swoon Soon is originally from. There was so much implied motion and purpose in her form that Boccioni would be proud. We desperately wanted to bring her to life and see where she would go. Looking at her static was like watching a parked car.

The car in The Gap was designed by Lexus for the Spielberg/Cruise film Minority Report. Said Spielberg - "I've been driving a Lexus SUV, and I thought Lexus might be interested in going into a speculative future to see what the transportation systems and cars would look like on our highways in 50 years. The result of that exploration is something that elevates and transforms driving into an environmental experience."

The visitors at the annual car show hosted by Art Center in Pasadena were unable to partake in this ‘environmental experience’, but could peer inside and imagine what it might be like. Throughout the film the midday sun yields a constant flair, which sits just above a large and brutal looking hole where the body had presumably been damaged in transit.

Sit on it.

Los Angeles, where we now live, is less forgiving for those on foot. As well as enduring the suspicious glares and, frankly, contempt from those sat in traffic, the cliché that no-one walks in LA can rattle around in your head. As such, walking somewhere has an air of defiance, and ‘going for a walk’ i.e. – with no destination in mind, is seen as sheer madness, and potentially dangerous. When, as is often the case, you can see your destination 5 miles away there is no rhythm whatsoever, just a drone. On some blocks where the buildings recede and there’s no shade at all, you sometimes think, this might be it: I won’t make it to that tree, to that 7-11. This is where I will die.

Despite this, it’s actually not a bad place to walk. We just do it less. Our apartments are close enough to walk if we have 2 hours spare, which we often do. But typically we spend most of our spare hours indoors, at home. OP lives in Koreatown and spends much of his time on a daybed, which NR had never heard of before. Daybeds are interesting because they blur the acts of sitting and sleeping, day and night, and consequently time itself. From his modernist Hollywood apartment NR also bends time in his own way, by sitting at his breakfast nook far beyond breakfast time and frequently past even dinner.

Whilst time traveling, OP would often have his copy of Selected Ambient Works 85-92 in full view. The back of this record sleeve features the Aphex logo, divided into four and reconfigured to make a friendly cartoon face that seems to wink at you. OP abstracted this abstraction of an abstraction once more by turning it clockwise by 90 degrees. He noticed that within this reconfiguration he saw a man - a walking man. And if you were to repeat this image in a grid formation, a second man appeared, walking in the opposite direction. One is a faceplate, and other a dickhead.