reel music festival 2011 : omn presents ‘portland music videos’ at mississippi studios on sunday

Although in the cable TV world it may seem that Jersey Shore killed the video star, bands continue to make music videos by the thousands, and Portland is no exception. With our loads of local artists, from the screen to strings (and other instruments), we have an environment ripe for music video making.

From shot-and-edited-in-a-day on whatever gear and budget the vocal and visual artists could cobble together to incredibly polished, professionally labored works, Oregon Music News has poured through the reels (and by reels we mean YouTube and Vimeo) and came up with a list of Portland Music Videos, which we will present at Mississippi Studios on Sunday, January 16th at 7 and 10pm. The first showing will include introductions and anecdotes from directors and artists while the second showing will feature several additional videos.

We bring to the theater a swath of videos that represent Portland’s diverse scene. There’s the Portland Cello Project’s delicate plucking and bowing set to an entomological marionette (below) contrasted by good ole PDX rock’n'roll from The Dandy Warhols, Viva Voce, The Thermals (in a video that features Portlandia star Carie Brownstein), and Blitzen Trapper. We have amazing songwriters’ stories married with film from folk-inspired, indie-pop collectives like Y La Bamba, Loch Lomond, and Nick Jaina. There is live footage and documentary-inspired live takes from Into The Woods bouncing off electro-dance makers Glass Candy (with their first-ever video after 11 years together!), YACHT, and Copy. And there’s even the Pink Martini contest winner from a filmmaking fan.

We strove to choose recent videos so most come from the last year or so but a few internet classics were too good to be skipped, like Red Fang’s “Prehistoric Dog” (below), and we also wanted to remember the late John Callahan’s ode to his “Portland Girl.”


From professionally obsessed to hastily improvised, we’re proud to show you 90 minutes of Portland’s best crafted music paired with finely tuned visuals on the big screen.

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See the complete list of videos and directors on OMN and find all the music videos streaming here.