Circuit Bending With Satan

Daniel Demaggio is a visual artist working out of the Detroit area. He's been drinking the next-level gravy for sure and I'm a little infatuated with his perverse and beautiful style. A friend hipped me to "Circuit Bending with Satan" yesterday and I can't stop watching it. In this bizarre short, Satan patiently explains to his child viewers how to hack into their music toys and rearrange the circuits to produce hip, experimental sounds - the better to make (the devil's) tracks with.

It's funny on many levels and visually ebullient, with crude lo-fi giving way to gorgeous bursts of dayglo animation. The way it tweaks the "learning" genre of the Saturday morning kids' TV programs from my youth is cute, and could lend itself to only working on one level of ironic nostalgia. But it's too strange for that and doesn't come off as ironic on any level. Like all great comedy, it works because it takes itself completely seriously and abides by an internal logic: of course the devil is wearing dishwashing gloves; of course he speaks in a dated hard-rap cadence; of course he's trying to capture children's immortal souls, and yet takes a moment to caution them about socket safety.

The thing I like most about this is that it was clearly done for the love. It justifies itself and sells nothing. There's no product tie-in, no band being plugged. It's just a brief, distorted thought bubble popping from one artists' brain that needed to be captured.