The brains behind Night Slugs and Actress’s striking visuals unveils his latest creation.
Nic Hamilton has been impressing us with his environments for the likes of Bok Bok, Future Brown and Lukid for a few years now, and his new project for Essex electronic producer Sim Hutchins is equally hypnotic.
Hutchins began his production career in and around the grime scene, working with MCs and playing on pirate radio and at East Anglian free parties. His approach eventually became more experimental and introverted as he developed longer-form tracks for last year’s Ecology Tapes EP and his debut album, I Enjoy To Sweep A Room, which was released on No Pain In Pop in November.
The video for album track ‘Wasp Cell’ is essentially a happy accident, as Hamilton began working on it without even telling Hutchins. “I picked it out right away from the album,” he explains. “It appealed to me because it sounded like an ever-evolving slow motion fall into a large black and yellow hole.”
The pair first met online years ago,”trolling for the love of music” on Twitter and Dubstepforum. “Back then Burial only had one tweet and it was ‘settling down to some MGS4’,” remembers Hutchins. “That tweet should have been preserved forever in the digital dubstep hall of fame, but I think Kode9 made him delete it.”
It took them a few years to get round to collaborating, however. “I knew Sim made music but hadn’t heard much of it – he wouldn’t give it to me,” says Hamilton. “I rinsed his amazing Ecology mixtape on loop in the background at home for months.”
“I’d seen some of the earliest work Nic did for Actress, and so was stoked to see them start to work together, and later advance to collaborating together for the gig at St Johns in Hackney,” adds Hutchins. “I hugely admire Nic’s technical prowess, and the concepts in his work. Also I learnt from him what a SimCloth was.”
Hamilton eventually revealed the flickering, oily textures he’d secretly been working on for ‘Wasp Cell’, and unsurprisingly, Hutchins was a fan.
“This is the first time we’d collaborated on anything, but really this was just a successful experiment on his part that ended up fitting really well with my music. Both of our vocations rely on us working in ultra fine detail, but through separate mediums and in opposite directions – Nic’s ultra fine 3D HD versus my pointillist, distorted lo-fi music-mess.
“Obviously I took drugs to it.”
Grab Hutchins’ I Enjoy To Sweep A Room from No Pain in Pop and check out more contemporary animators creating new worlds for Night Slugs, Lee Gamble and PC Music.
