Tusk festival is an annual event based in the North East featuring artists and musicians from around the globe. In 2020 the festival was held online, entirely free to watch.
Drooping Finger was one of 14 selected acts from the local area to be invited to submit a performance film.
Like many people recording in isolation and with a very short deadline, I found there was limited technology available, but this became part of the challenge. The bulk of the sounds used in the piece originate from my ever reliable Realistic Concertmate 200 keyboard run through a series of effects pedals, with interwoven digitally processed six string banjo experiments. The intro comes from a cassette tape of surf sounds from Galveston Island Texas, played through a very dusty old tape deck. A small portion (although very much distorted beyond recognition) of a home recorded tape of 'Kiss.fm 1998' found in a local gutter was also used in this mix, alongside a very short sample of Dextro from a heavily scratched CD-R of a live performance, made all the more wonky by a faulty CD mixer loop function. All these segments were eventually mixed into the final piece, Cage Dive.
The accompanying video was made with even less time to spare and comprises some segments of stolen footage of a deep sea jellynose fish and a nautilus or two, plus dolphins and seagulls as seen from the deck of MV Global Mariner. These clips are mixed into ambiguous underwater visuals created mostly with tin foil sheets and torches in the bottom of a bath, as seen by a phone in a plastic box floating on the surface. The lights at the end were the only part filmed outdoors, featuring well let student halls peeking through a dark patch of local woodland.
The video can be found here in the Tusk archive, alongside hundreds of other amazing performances from almost every edition of the ten years of the festival's history:
youtu.be/cg-gHcFLm1s
Finally, the artwork used here is a variation of the classic Tusk logo, 'remixed' by me for a new T-shirt. I focused on a digital approach to match the online event, processing a photo of an older Tusk shirt with additional glitches until I arrived at the final design.
tuskfestival.com
released December 2, 2020
Sounds and visuals by Jonas Halsall
(except the aforementioned samples)
Mastered by Ewan Mackenzie