The Relaxomatic Project was a cool jazz-rock collaboration between Dan Sperber, Luke Casey (Eye TV) and Justyn Pilbrow (future Elemeno P) and “Every Day There’s Something New” is the first of their two NZOA funded videos.
The track is a cool instrumental number, and the video goes along with that vibe. The vid starts with old footage of a radio being tuned to various stations. Curious, I googled the call signs and discovered that it’s an Australian radio (WF = Westralian Farmers, QG = Queensland Government). But the radio is tuning in classic New Zealand radio, including Aunt Daisy’s cheery “Good morning, everybody!”
Then the video kicks off with old film footage that looks to be from the 1920s. And as the song repeats a sample of a woman saying “every day you die a little”, we see footage of death-defying stunts.
There’s tricks performed in, on and around aeroplanes, acrobatic flips done off a rope suspended from a hot air balloon, one guy who smashes through a flaming wall as he’s hanging from an aircraft, and a car that jumps over a building and then smashes apart upon landing.
It seems that in the early 20th century, all this new technology – aeroplanes, automobiles, motion picture – was combined to create the 1920s equivalent of Jackass, crazy stunts done to entertain. Of course, all this stuff never actually went away. It’s just that instead of watching stunts on their own, modern audiences see them contextualised in action films.
Combining the vintage tomfoolery with the chilled jazz of the Relaxomatic Project takes away a lot of the power of the stunts. If it had been accompanied by thrilling orchestral music, that would ramp things up a lot. But instead the cool beats like it more like “Heh, you guys.”
Best bit: the brief mention on the radio of a recipe for beetroot chutney.
Next… fur, mud and bubbles.