Video: L.A. Takedown, ‘The Swimmer’

S.Lo on December 20th, 2019

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Whoever avoided the sciences because they had more artistic inclinations should perhaps take a cue from L.A. Takedown’s mastermind Aaron Olson and his father, Arthur J. Olson, who, in 1981 produced a short film with fellow chemist T.J. O’Donnell (edited by Matt Hewitt) called “Tomato Bushy Stunt Virus.”

At the intersection of math, design, programming, chemistry and biology, Olson senior used the publicly-funded GRAMPS graphic language to interpret what CLAMPS (a Classical Many Particle Simulator) determined were the molecular dynamics of the C subunit arms of said Tomato Bushy Virus as found by a team of scientists over ten years in a Harvard laboratory. The dot matrices of the early video were developed via University of California-based advanced computer graphics engineering in Berkeley and San Francisco.

About 40 years later, Olson senior tapped on his artistically-inclined son’s shoulder. “He was looking to have me make some original music to the video so he could post it on YouTube [another Northern California-based graphics venture],” shared the musician. “A kind of collaboration we’ve done in the past with another animation of his, while at the same time I was looking to make a music video for the song ‘The Swimmer’ and the two just matched beautifully! So we let the two merge somewhat naturally and went with the flow, so to speak.”

The result of the fusion of father and son uber-talents is akin to watching the original TRON in a darkened movie theater, when Windows and Mac graphic interfaces on handheld touch-screen tablets were absolutely unfathomable. “Swimmer” narrates glowing, rotating displays of cellular links and structures across an otherwise darkened screen while Moog-like synths swell forward and back in the aural plane. Guitar and drums, Miles Wintner and Mose Wintner listed on the assist with the latter, join in to bring further excitement and emotion to the unfolding of the viral image. It’s hard to say if the graphics and music would separately provoke as much wonder without ever having merged. Once viewed, “This early computer animation show[ing] scientists’ first-ever view of an intact spherical virus in atomic detail” can’t be unseen and the music (engineered and mixed by Jason Quever) can’t be heard the same way again. Their marriage is too perfect and feels genetically aligned, even if separately conceived.

“The Swimmer” will appear on L.A. Takedown’s forthcoming album “Our Feeling of Natural High,” out March 13 via CastleFace Records.

||| Watch: The video for “The Swimmer”