Colin Dawson is probably best known as the former guitarist for Haunted Horses and current ax man for Stickers. But lately he’s been branching out into visual art under the name Daisy Heroin, creating stop-motion videos that, with their surreal irreverence for pop-culture effluvia and high art, recall the work of Paper Rad, Black Dice, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus animator Terry Gilliam. Dawson’s style of jerky movements, stream of hallucinatory absurdities, and stimuli overload complements the clips’ supremely strange and abstract electronic music, which he also composes under the handle T. His soundtrack’s as chilling and jarring as Mort Garson and Morton Subotnick’s trippiest compositions. On April 20, Dawson will release his first VHS, Art Show, which will be part of a series of short videos and will feature scores by fellow Seattle artists Justin Gallego of DreamDecay and Ian Kurtis Crist of Health Problems.
Dawson says that the next batch of videos after Art Show “will conclude on the summer solstice on June 21. Each theme/VHS release will align with all equinoxes and solstices to track the progression of ideas over the years I plan to do this work—hopefully forever bringing visual magick to your everyday life.”
As for his musical alter ego T, Dawson says he’ll “eventually start to play out [under that name], but for now, I’m working on the video side of things, as it has become my new favorite way to write music. I’ve always wanted to do ‘film scores,’ because I like to create atmospheres, and textures, to accentuate an aesthetic. So in this early phase, I’m going to have fun as director, and composer.”
Check out a snippet from Art Show below and go here for more info on Daisy Heroin.
