Line Out – A Long-Form Experiment

Several years ago I found myself deep inside the rabbit hole of found footage that exists within the unparalleled archive.org. The range of material on the site, specifically in the gargantuan Prelinger Archive, is incredibly broad. Family vacation reels from the 40s, racy cigarette commercials, fire and brimstone southern sermons, atom bomb tests, those old films about the planets your 7th grade teacher might’ve wheeled in on a cart from the library. They’re all there, alongside so much more.

Enthralled, I had the idea to draw from this trove of public domain footage… synthesizing these strange and wonderful visuals into a long-format piece, pairing them with some equally strange and wonderful records. Something like an installation, a film, or a tapestry of long-lost, never-made music videos.

That something has finally taken shape with Line Out, a one hour piece featuring twenty recordings from psychedelic and avant-garde mainstays like Can and Faust, lesser known practitioners such as Agitation Free and Novalis, and contemporary experimenters including Dungen, Beak >, and Califone, amongst others. The end result is a sometimes mesmerizing, sometime amusing, and wholly psychedelic experiment. Tune In. Turn On. Line Out. words / s brower

Note: The provenance of the recombinant audio/visuals can be found here.

Support independent media via our Patreon page, which allows readers and listeners to directly support Aquarium Drunkard as it expands its scope while receiving access to our secret stash, including bonus audio, exclusive podcasts, printed ephemera, and vinyl records.