Pentagram London’s first music video is Dump Run, a single from Jesse Hackett’s first solo album - Junk - and is the world’s first video ever to be created from the graphics of a mighty PSR -110 Yamaha keyboard.
Hackett is a London-based artist who is a long-standing collaborator with Damon Albarn, forming part of the Gorillaz live band and Africa Express. Junk is Hackett’s first solo album under his real name and was composed entirely with a Yamaha PSR-110 which he found at a London recycling centre.
Describing the process behind Junk, Hackett says, “Largely constructing an album using the Yamaha keyboard I found in a recycling dump was for me an exercise in creative economy limitations and recycling. The twelve animal sound pads that the keyboard featured were a puzzling feature and I quickly decided to use them as a signature tone across the whole LP.”
The video uses Hackett's Yamaha as its inspiration. It is a cacophony of keyboard-based motion graphics interspersed with live action footage of Hackett, who is drawn into the instrument’s visual world.
The keyboard has many unique graphic details - symbols of lions, birds and trains, weird and wonderful musical genres, simple instructional buttons. Pentagram took those graphics and animated them so they danced and popped to the track, then intercut them with a reconstruction of Hackett walking to the dump, finding the keyboard and performing the song.
The video was shot in the recycling centre where the keyboard was originally found. The live action section of the video has been treated with a VHS filter to create harmony with Yamaha’s nostalgic graphics.
Buy Junk here.
