Gramatik is known for lush, big beats that don't come near the pop-house or "dubstep" tunes dominating today's dance music community. Instead, the Slovenian-born producer focuses on rhythms and arrangements that incorporate the best parts of countless genres -- house, breakbeat, techno, electro, blues, jazz, soul, funk, drum 'n' bass -- and tosses them together in a thoughtful blend that's perhaps only rivaled by his label boss, Pretty Lights.
Like Pretty Lights, Gramatik releases his music for free. His new EP is entitled #digitalfreedom, a banner of sorts for the type of relationship he has with the work he creates. At Gramatik's live shows, the emphasis is on feeling the music, with little in the way of pomp and circumstance. Just a man, a lot of machines and a really big sound.
"Solidified," a track off #digitalfreedom tickled the fancy of director Brad Hasse, who had wanted to try filming with "bokeh" images for some time. In "Solidified," Hasse found the perfect source material for a bokeh project.
"Bokeh is basically the out-of-focus area in an image," he explained to HuffPost. "When you film an image with various light sources, and 'rack out' of focus, the bokehs are created from each of the lights, and create that giant colorful circle." In the scenes with the silhouettes and bokehs, all "animations" are actually in-camera effects, with nothing added in post production.
In the video, these circles first appear as distorted city lights. Over the course of the short, however, they transform into monsters that torment an older gentleman who sees them after smoking an unknown substance.
"I think the story is cool and it fits the track perfectly," Gramatik said in an email to HuffPost. "I'm a huge sci-fi fan so this kind of stuff makes me happy."
For Hasse and Gramatik, making a music video is a great way of blending promotion with the added value of a new art piece. And for an artist who gives his music away for free on the internet, there can be no greater tool than YouTube.
"I feel like MTV kinda became obsolete because of Youtube," he said. "But it seems like It's just natural evolution though, people just want to watch videos on demand, whenever, wherever. Once you have that option, you never really wanna go back to the old ways, I mean who still wants to sit in front of a TV, waiting for their favorite music video to show up?"
Hasse said he chose the goblin shapes which appear as silhouettes to lend a "light and quirky" vibe to the clip, which allows it to play off the track's darker, heavy sound without going too far. "It was a chance to still use 'scary' characters, but in a more sarcastic and charismatic sort of way," he said.
