Adelaide band "Night Rites" have a new music video that has won best experimental short and best director of a short at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival. We spoke to director Mike Retter about creating this clip, his interest in music videos while growing up and his unfinished feature film "Clair de Lune"..

Mike Retter: In my early twenties I was at a mate's house, a British guy named Stuart .. He put on a CD with a blurry pink cover and the oval boombox started vibrating with a harmonic noise. I felt it was a sound I had always been searching for. It was the Irish band My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album and from that moment onwards I was a changed person. Layered droney atmospheric rock was something I had delved into with the live recordings of Nick Cave's early group The Birthday Party, but Loveless had an introverted nature and sweetness in its studio perfection, where the noise was tamed for an entirely different emotional purpose.

The pink cover of Loveless was actually a blurry hand in motion captured over the strings of a guitar. To be specific, it's actually a hand holding the tremolo pedal while at the same time grazing the strings on the guitar, something Kevin Shields did to physically bend the notes of the music as he played. That pink photograph would colour every experience of the album, it summed up the sound so perfectly, the layered and diffused image mimicked the guitar distortion and the colour was the warmth of the record.

How did you want to visually interpret Night Rite's track "DEN"?

With "DEN", the band Night Rites are working in a similar way to My Bloody Valentine in terms of thick atmospheric and spatial sound but it doesn't sound pink .. like their name, It's much darker. So when interpreting this song visually, everything was darkly lit and desaturated. But I still wanted visual layers, visual distortion and an authentic depiction of the sound like MBV achieved with that Loveless album cover.

I have probably had to listen to DEN a thousand times while shooting and editing the clip and I still don’t get sick of it. There's so much going on in the music production, such a density... I challenge you to give it multiple listens and see what you get out of it each time. So I have tried to do this justice visually.. Give it as much idiosyncrasy as I can.. Create visual delays .. The track has a hum to it and so the visuals needed to reverberate .. I shot it in such a way where grain was baked into the footage and camera movement, sometimes shaky with stabilisation turned off, would mimic the pulsating sound. Lots of imagery is buried underneath, some you will see, some you may not - but perhaps you will feel it.

I also shot a series of still photos with an old Yashica Mat 124g film camera. The film stock was Fuji Provia 100, a slide film, which means the negative is actually a positive and thus looks like a normal full colour image when you hold it up to the light. It's also a larger film and so I put the developed celluloid strip in front of the video camera lens (like a crude telecine) and shot the band playing on a monitor behind the strip of film that's being rubbed past the lens. Essentially using the developed film that had images on it like a filter to create layered imagery. Glitchy film negative shots tend to evoke feelings of memory.

Tony Scott used hand-cranked cameras to create jerky, expressionistic visual layers in Man On Fire (2004), which is a very modern film and that was a strong influence here with the use of the slide film strips. Digital effects are very minimal in this music video.. It’s mostly analogue techniques such as using smoke machines, dry ice, specific lighting, camera movement, some VHS and other archaic processing by Matthew Gray, which was a cool collaboration .. And of course the use of splashing water in the ocean as the music gets heavier.

Did you watch much Rage on the ABC while growing up?

Music Videos, specifically in the pre-internet ABC Rage era, are fundamental to many Australian cultural upbringings (for better or worse). They form the background ambience to many social gatherings but also an entry-point to experimental film before we go deeper into things like SBS's Eat Carpet (R.I.P).

I don’t take drugs and rarely drink alcohol these days, but many years ago when I was a teenager on magic mushrooms, I specifically remember watching Nine Inch Nails "Head Like A Hole'' video and was struck by its use of rapid editing and overlapping of images. There was a head being rotated with a strobing voodoo ceremony over the top where a man was rotating sticks. The rapid editing back and forth between the shots does such a number on the brain it feels illegal. This cinematic technique was very effective and probably amplified by the drugged state I was in so it always stayed with me. Later on I would discover the origins of this style in early Soviet cinema.

The nihilistic content and point of view of Nine Inch Nails music videos is something that no longer interests me. The argument could be made that this kind of depressing stuff, which was soaked in heroin-use and nihilism, helped destroy a generation, continuing a decline since the baby-boomers stopped listening to their parents, instead embracing instant gratification and consumerism. It sort of predates or preempts the current opioid and crank (crystal meth) epidemics in the deindustrialised American "rust belt" (Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, etc) and now many parts of Australia. But it's undeniable that this period of alternative music videos had very clever artistic technique and aesthetic. Part of my cinephilic journey has been finding this kind of visual experimentation and style in work that doesn't destroy the soul. Something that can actually be found in the rich contemporary meme video culture such as the "hyperborean" genre found on telegram.

Rapid editing is something I have used quite a bit in the 3rd act of the music video, to evoke something in the same way 2001: A Space Odyssey uses flashing coloured lights in its "stargate sequence".. An archetypal structure for experimental film where climax can be created purely through expressionist film-form and technique rather than literal narrative alone. And like 2001, you will notice a calm directly following this sequence, which creates a kind of relief. I think a lot of filmmakers independently channel a similar structure, regardless of how abstract things may be, because there's something true to life about it, like a Platonic form, a statue found in a block of stone, a 3-act structure is natural and instinctive for creators and audiences.

What sort of production and editing went into this?

We tried to create very atmospheric and evocative footage but this music video was really made in the edit and that took a long time. Splicing, manipulating and collaging the images. The genesis of this film clip was actually a phone call or text from Ryder Grindle, the projectionist at the Mercury Cinema.. They had some event at the Fringe Festival where a dozen bands and a dozen filmmaking groups made music videos within a seven day deadline. But they were missing one filmmaking team.. I thought this would be perfect for a screenwriter friend, Jeremy Roberts, who wanted to start making films himself, but because I had to end up shooting and editing the clip, it was simpler if I just directed it as well. So Jeremy did lighting and co-produced with me. Having not actually met the band, we just rocked-up and run-and-gunned the whole thing quickly with a basic visual concept based on the sound. Ned Bajic helped with some backlit dry ice shots in the ocean and practical water FX.

We met that seven day deadline and what I would describe as a roughcut was shown at the Mercury Cinema event. Feedback was quite positive, but I'm glad I was unavailable for that screening because I was never happy with only a few days to edit the clip. The track is six minutes long, we had an option of going with a shorter "radio edit" version (4mins), but this removed what I felt were some of the best passages of music.. Apart from more editing time post-screening, we also went and shot one more evening with the band and did some specific high-framerate shots with Jeremy in the ocean at night with water directly hitting the camera lens.

The finished clip would eventually premiere at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival on closing night where it won best experimental short and best director of a short. 2 days later we showed it in Adelaide at the Sam Hyde Film Festival, Palace Nova Cinema. That's where I got to see it on the big screen for the first time and we had a great crowd reaction. It's probably my most satisfying public exhibition of work. The third act, which consists mostly of splashing water, looked great on the big cinema screen. The song I had heard more than a thousand times felt new because of the high fidelity sound presentation in the theatre. I think the clip succeeds in depicting the music visually, the two things become one. We then had another screening at Adelaide University organised by the Cinematic Cultural Research Unit (CCRU) along with other experimental shorts and a sprawling discussion about the future of cinema.

After Youth On The March, you said you were to make one more vertical film to complete a trilogy, the erotic thriller Clair de Lune.. Where is this project at?

Clair de Lune is a feature project that was derailed by Covid and perhaps my own hubris. It's like my own Apocalypse Now.. The press wrote articles about Apocalypse Now's delayed release entitled "Apocalypse When?".. Around 90% of Clair de Lune is already shot but there are some key scenes, which are artistically and technically challenging that I still have to complete. With the passage of time, there is some melancholy that I haven't finished, but strangely there is also some ecstasy ... Because as I learn new things about editing, film form and analogue photography, they are incorporated into the vision and it will be a better film for it.

I have one shoot coming up soon for Clair de Lune that involves a wall of TV monitors.. That's something I'm doing with the CCRU.. This was not in the original script, but the luxury of time allows you to evolve and develop things. if you think of a new idea, it can make it into the film.. But you obviously don’t want a film to remain unfinished forever.

Soon I'm going to release an experimental short, which is basically a TV show that exists in the universe of Clair de Lune and gives a glimpse of that film in a different context. It's like releasing something with an abstract or conceptual trailer inside it. I've taken one supporting character of Clair de Lune, a real-life martial artist, and made an entire magazine-style TV show revolving around him. Like going on an irrational tangent. It's called Kolesnikov's World and will be released later this year. In real life he was actually the bodyguard for an eastern-European head of state and so he's depicted as a solitary warrior. I therefore consider this a stylised documentary.

Part of the reason Clair de Lune has not been completed is that I genuinely want to impact cinema with this low-budget film and much of that will come down to an advanced film-form and style achieved by various editing techniques and image processing. I'm not so arrogant to say that it will impact cinema, but that is the ambition.. There are some great acting performances in this film and I look forward to how it’s all sculpted together.

I feel like my life in the interim has been spent studying cinema, both historically (the 1980s Simpson/Bruckheimer films that incorporated MTV video and commercial aesthetics) and the absolute latest contemporary work like youtube/memes. This has meant collecting lots of physical media to aid my study. Like the 1980s incorporation of new forms like MTV into cinema, I wish to also combine online filmmaking styles (particularly editing) with my feature narrative. This project has become far more postmodern than I first intended. So this Night Rites music video, other short work I have done like Kolesnikov's World and the exhibition of other people's contemporary film in the Sam Hyde Film Festival all constitute practical study in style and aesthetics.. Which will in-turn inform the finished product of Clair de Lune. It's all connected. Even when I'm not working on Clair de Lune, I'm still really working on it.

Will you make more music videos?

Yes, I think I will make more music videos.. This was really my first one and I liked doing it. 10 years ago I made my own version of Eat Carpet or Liquid Television for Channel 44 called "Bandwidth", much of which involved image and music. But this Night Rites music video was my first built from the ground-up to depict a band and their sound. Music videos are a great artistic opportunity. There is no shortage of good local music to make a clip for and I encourage people to do it. If you are out of the loop, just get in contact with 3D Radio, Radio Adelaide, Fresh FM (or your own local community Stations) and you will be put in-touch with some of the latest music to hopefully inspire making a clip. Get out of your bubble. Make contact with some of these bands.

There is also some talk about a physical media (DVD) release of various music videos and experimental shorts in Adelaide. If that happens, it will be packed with weird material and lots of extra features.. There's also a proposed distribution model that is insane and would allow the DVD to be discovered by the public in a very odd way. I think it's time to do irrational things like that.

What do you mean exactly, where will the DVD be distributed and what will be "odd" or "insane" about it?

I can't get into that yet.. But it should be interesting.

Echo Sandvig is a musician and sound designer.