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Video Premiere: Tone Ra and Will Zaret explore rhythmic glitches in atmospheric beats

Electronic music, in its myriad forms and styles, has always wrestled with notions of how the listener should process the sound. The less arrogant and ignorant forms of dance music allow the recipient to take it in mentally, adopting an eyes-closed approach that creates a clearer vision inward, milking the emotion and riding piggyback on a procession of beats and rhythms that feel as much a mental journey as any physical one on a dance floor. The moody, experimental bass sounds of Boston producer Tone Ra usually fall in the eyes-closed category, allowing his signature rhythms to form a personal and unique cohesion lofted somewhere in the dense space nestled between the listeners’ ears.

So what do go when it comes time to crafting a video?

One approach is to pry the eyes back open and enlist Boston-based visual artist Will Zaret to storyboard the appropriate images you may not see otherwise. In Tone Ra’s video for “Reason”, the first track off his upcoming EP Never See Me Again, out August 22 via tireless Boston collective Lifted Contingency, the track’s jilted, atmospheric sounds are aligned with Zaret’s carefully edited landscape glitches.

The music is not just a framework, but a tour guide.

“‘Reason’ is a song about leaving,” Tone Ra says. “The feeling of wanting more than the present guides it. It’s a melancholy take on the last year of being in my own feelings.”

With that in mind, and “Reason” quietly throbbing overhead, Zaret went to work.

“I started out by finding public domain footage, and then doing frame by frame editing in After Effects to make sure the changes would be in sync with the beat,” he tells Vanyaland. “Then I processed the footage through some hardware, a CRT monitor, and a LCD monitor in realtime while recording with a camera. After that I took it back through After Effects. My process takes me back and forth between hardware and software. Every step in the process leaves a unique mark on the visuals. Each device creates a different glitch. I am all about glitch art, analog and digital. This video only uses Analog glitches. I don’t focus on any specific media, just glitch.”

Embrace it below.