The Birth of Shoegaze Online discussion and plalist playthrough

I was invited to appear on the concert and vinyl playlist playthrough discussion. I’m not sure I had anything clever to say about shoegaze. It’s not really ever been a focus for me. We knew it as indie pop, and included maybe other things. We didn’t include the Cocteau Twins as they were earlier or the Jesus and Mary Chain because they were more 60s psychedelic than floppy fringes from Reading.
anyway it was fun, and Ill be curating my own playlist in November.

https://concertandvinyl.com/2026/09/17/record-club-19-shoegaze-special-the-origins/

Schaeffers gt 5 Exhibition

My exhibition was very fun, I unfortunately did not sell that much, a bit. However it was a nice experience and my and Martin got to play (twice) with our new “small things” concert concept.. which, although we need practice, went ok. Heres som random pics from the weekend.

Exhibition at Galleri Schaeffers gt 5

I’m having an exhibition of my gelli print work at Mark Steiners Galleri Schaeffers gt 5 in Grünerløkka in Oslo on the 4th to the 7th of June. As luck would have it, it’s Musikkens dag in Oslo on the Saturday, so me and Martin as Electricity will also play in the gallery twice, along with three others.

Image Sound Lab

I saw the cool seismic readout from the earthquake that occurred in Norway on the 26th March 2026 and thought… hmm? Whatever happened to Metasynth?
Its not gone, but its tricky to set up, so i made this… ok so it’s not the same, I doubt I will make whole albums with it, but, its a start.
Work in Progress.

If you want to make sound from an image, then try this:

https://markfrancombe.com/image_sound_lab/index.html

Depth Map Video Processor – Setup Guide (Mac)

Introduction.


When making videos for Cranes recent re-releases, Im always working solely with old material. For Dada 331 I used footage from the Paradiso, and for “Wires” and “Here comes the snow”, both the videos used footage from a show in teh earlier 2000´s which I didn’t play at. I didn’t originally start with the footage of snow and landscape near my home in Norway.
As the song comes from the album “Particles and Waves” I first tried to build a video out of the DATA from that concert footage, and the audio waveforms of the song.
The technique I wanted to use was using a program called Touch Designer which I have been wanting to try for a while. Normally used in VJ effects or artist gallery installations, its particularly good at taking data and transforming it in realtime into visuals.
So I tried, using the video and audio for “Light Song.
So its two main elements. Visuals created from a particle system powered from teh audio that has been split into 3 frequency bands, a bit like an old Sound to Light system in school discos from the 70s, and 3d video generated from the gig footage.
Here what I wanted to do was, by using the same particle system, but this time moving teh particles based on depth in the video. If a particle was on Alisons arm, it would be infront of a partical that was on her face. So first I had to get depth information from teh video. iPhones generate it, (If they have the Lidar lens) and 3d modelling can generate a depth map, but not old video footage So I used an AI too from artificial labs to “guess” a depth map. This worked, but only on a frame by frame basis, so I had to create a way to

1. chop up the video into single frames
2. upload one image to artificial labs to do the depth map
3. download it when finished and upload the next

As the site only did one frame at a time I programmed using Claude a system to do this automatically.

When I finished, it hadn´t quite worked. It was a cool experiment, but we decided not to upload it to the Cranes channel.
But it WAS a fun experiment, so rather than bury it on a hard-drive heres first, I decided to put it here:
This is VERY NERDY. But the full and geeky explanation video complete with instructions and code follows on the second page of this post.

First, lets see the finished video. exclusive here and on YouTube.


CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NERDY “MAKING OF” VIDEO

Stream of Conscious Project

Stream of Conscious is an attempt to make a few online visuals using good old html.
All of them will generate images, fit for a psychedelic rave or techno band, and interactive by the operator and configurable.
thats it… Let me know if you use them, and credit me.

Ill post a few images here soon.

The Image Stream takes up to nine keywords. they are mapped to the buttons but also to the numbers on the computer keypad, for when you run fullscreen, when all controls are removed and control is affected by the keypad only. Each keyword fetches images from a number of royalty sites and displays that at the speed shown (default fucking fast). The collection of keywords can be saved as a json file on your computer for quicker retrieval, if for example you had one set per son, and wanted to display certain images of parts of the song.

The Image Stream

The Word Stream takes a sentence or series of words. (NO limit to length, so paste away) the effects are described in the ? menu. just press keys on the keypad to discover.

The Word Stream

The Data Stream takes a word or words, finds articles based this search and displays them, but vasriuous colliding parameters the searches interact and new searches are born.

0 – Start/Stop 7 – Prune weak nodes 8 – CHAOS BURST 9 – Invert colours Enter – Fullscreen

The Data Stream

The Glyph Stream
International scripts, symbols, and characters strobing — Arabic, Cyrillic, Kanji, IPA phonetics, mathematical notation, ancient scripts. No meaning conveyed, pure visual rhythm of unfamiliar letterforms. Deeply disorienting in the best possible way.

The Glyph Stream

The Shape Stream
The Shape Stream would be the first tool that’s purely abstract and geometric — no external content, no language at all. Just raw form.It would also be the most musical of the tools so far. Geometric shapes strobing at high speed have an incredibly direct relationship to rhythm — you feel them rather than read them. For live VJ work that’s a powerful thing to have.

The Shape Stream

The Face Stream A dedicated variant of Image Stream that uses portrait/face search terms, but with an added face-crop mode — zooming and centering on detected facial regions. The effect of rapid human faces is uniquely unsettling and powerful in live performance.

The Face Stream