For those of you who've been begging for a musical venture somewhat based on your old '70s View-Master and other forms of childhood entertainment, your wait is over. But for those of you eagerly awaiting a death of J.Lo television series, we've got a long way to go. Master View pulls heavy amounts of cartoon breaks, old school video games, and good old Ninja Tune funk and spits them out into two options: (1) a 2 and 3-D DVD capturing the sheer lunacy of Hexstatic's visual artistry (check the video for "Timber" with Coldcut if you can), and (2) an easy to carry CD version. A UK duo of A/V kings, Robin Brunson, and Stuart Warren-Hill take the lo-fi hip-hop downtempo of Nightmares On Wax and lace it with a heavy dose of Skalpel's style of jazz-funk while visually mixing the abstract computer animation that surrounded Radiohead's Kid A, the absurdity of Kid Koala's cartoon videos, and loops from the Discovery channel. And they make it work seamlessly.
Of the times you've seen a movie based on a book and sometime later read the original text, could you picture practically nothing but the characters from the movie? This DVD, which contains videos for all 11 songs, will do something similar, as every vid contains not only subtle humor and striking images; but each one is carefully synchronized to the music featuring the likes of scrolling backgrounds and video game action that pop with every sound beginning with Pong and progressing through Atari, ColecoVision, and Nintendo in "Extra Life," the cavorting speakers rocking out with a turntablist monkey in "L-Virata," the following of a Ninja down a city street past a Jello Poking Demonstration to a Ninja Gaiden-style duel over an inarguably offensive dog in "Chase Me," and so on. The most stunning of these are the singing parrots in "Perfect Bird" and the rambling old man in the single "Salvador," which I will always picture clear as day under any circumstance of listening to those tracks.
Hexstatic's 2000 debut Rewind similarly contained both a CD and a CD-Rom featuring vids to all those tracks predating the now standard "Bonus DVD" and placing them, for this as well as other reasons, at the cutting edge of A/V presentation. Crucial to this is the fact they have never released a CD, waited four months and re-released it with a couple bonus tracks, then waited another few months to re-re-release it with a bonus disc like, oh, every act on the Rolling Stone album sales chart. These guys give more to their fans. You've seen the rest, now get the best, a class act all the way.
1. Extra Life
2. Chase Me
3. Telemetron
4. L-Virata
5. Perfect Bird
6. Salvador
7. Living
8. Distorted Minds
9. That Track
10. Toys Are Us
11. Pulse
More about: Hexstatic
