The Crystal Method Starts Machinima’s New Music Video Series

The Crystal Method have always been alchemists of sound, experimenting with tonal subtleties and electronic dance grooves since the early 90’s. That’s why news of the LA-based duo playing around with video game engines for their latest music video doesn’t really surprise me.

TCM’s Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland opted for an all-machinima based video for their new track “Play For Real” (which also features Heavy) and launched the video (below) late yesterday as part of Machinima’s (the network) new music video series.

As part of the distro plan, the track in the video, “Play For Real,” is available now for one week only as a free download for the fans directly from the band’s website, while a full digital EP including remixes of the song by Dirtyphonics, Le Castle Vania, Left/Right & Digital Pizza and Team Awesome will be released August 15 via TCM’s own Tiny e Records.

To helm the video, TCM tapped 20 year-old music video director, and machinima prodigy, Kootra (Jordan Mathewson) who now has began making Machinima in April 2008 and is one of its earliest successes in the program, with hundreds of videos to his name—and about 150k subscribers to his personal YouTube channel.

“It was created inside the environment of Borderlands, the highly popular sci-fi based video game released in 2009, using the Unreal Editor, a fully integrated editing environment,” said Kootra on the project. “I chose that game specifically because I thought Clap-Traps, small robots in the game, fit the song style very well. They’re very interactive characters in the game, and although are oftentimes used for target practice, they always add that comical twist to any video.

Machinima will be releasing new music videos weekly now as part of this new series, and has brought on music supervisor for film and TV, Budd Carr (Terminator, Natural Born Killers, Wall Street) to produce. Other artists confirmed for future videos: Rob Zombie, Paul Oakenfold, Black Label Society, Porter Robinson, Drowning Pool and David Valentine from Electric Six. Machinima’s first exclusive game music video with Avenged Sevenfold is currently approaching 5 million views.