When Alec agreed to write the soundtrack for my first short Civilisation Virus it all started with DHR videos. With the 16mm footage I had as left overs we shot with one 3 minute role the speed video in dec. 1993 – no editing on this one. Low on Ice video and other classics followed – till I discovered in 1995 to use a mac and videocameras to be more indepen- dent in doing effects, editing, etc.. Also it was the closer approach to the DIGITAL HARDCORE sound to work with computers – it enabled me to cross visually boarders. In 1997 the firewire technology appeared and my first harddisk basically was looking like an open robot brain nailed on my desktop.
I’m kinda a hyperactive character, which was probably great for the music, so I fucked footage up and used highspeed visuals to give this paranoid feeling to the viewer, which seemed to work out pretty good. When Mike D of the beasties called up in 1996 to tell me that he loves all these videos I got kicked pretty hard, the answer was that I worked like a crazy doing one video after the other. ATR’s riotsound in combination with the imagery got more and more extreme in content and attitude so we were like a gang giving a shit about anybody else in the music industry – just doing our thing. The US was at that time our target area maybe England as well. At that time MTV was still quite open to play artistically crazy stuff at night, which over the years got worse and worse changing into a uniformed style how a music video has to look to get a play. In 1999 the japanese producer Akihiro Suzuki got in contact with me and screened the videos in Tokyo and Osaka. From there on a wave of filmfestival presence worldwide happened till now. DHR released all the videos on VHS right afterwards which was unlikely till that point. A couple of years later directors started to release there works on DVD’s.
The museum of modern arts took the alec presley video in their video archive with music video superstars, funny – this video costed 5 euros …the rest was my time investment and the help of friends. What matters in this scenario to create something out of nothing and it still reaches peoples worldwide.
After being bored of Music TV politics at that time I moved onto different fields like documentaries, etc..
Now it’s 2008 and Alec and me are still working together visually.
Philipp Virus, Berlin 2008
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