Music videos have always been inclined to explore the more experimental styles of the moving image, from The Beatles’ early experimentations with the form for “Strawberry Fields” to Queen’s kaleidoscopic disembodied heads in “Bohemian Rhapsody”, to modern day practitioners like Chris Cunningham and, more recently, Radical Friend. The weirder and more conceptual, the better—that’s how we like them. And now videos have even more scope to captivate us with their otherworldliness, thanks to the web and the current trend for interactivity.Combining interactivity with good old-fashioned weirdness is Osada, a browser-based online game/music video hybrid from Amanita Design. Some of you may remember Amanita from their strange but popular Samorost titles and other surreal browser games. Their latest creation, an interactive music video, follows in the footsteps of their previous inventive gamescapes, taking in an abstract ten minutes that is neither a music video nor game in the traditional sense.The gaming element amounts to clicking on various objects located within the scenery to activate musical components, with the sounds taking the strange sonic forms of a squirrel yelling into a loudspeaker, gurning Native Americans, guitar-playing cowgirls, and other experimental audio that wouldn’t be out of place on a Matthew Herbert album. The result is a unique audiovisual journey that appears to draw influences from Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python animations, Jan Švankmajer, and Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi in equal measure.
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