Black Plastic: Making Light&Magic

From Brooklyn Vegan:

Ladytron‘s excellent second album, Light & Magic, turns 20 on September 17, and to celebrate they’ve been releasing new videos for songs off the album. We’ve got the premiere of “Black Plastic,” which features video and photos of the band in Los Angeles, working on the album and having some fun, too. There’s also some informative “making of” text to go along with it.
“‘Black Plastic’ is a little time capsule of our 2002 recording sessions in Hollywood for Light & Magic,” says Ladytron’s Daniel Hunt. “We are kids. We look ready to take on the world. Hazy, nostalgic, and how we remember it.” Here’s a little more recollection from Dan:

“Making our second album in Los Angeles seemed counterintuitive at the time, at least amongst our peers, but it made perfect sense for us: our label Emperor Norton was there, and there was this group of wildly talented people in LA who wanted to work with us on it. While we were recording what was a very different sounding record to what else was around, this huge electro thing kicked off, and we were positioned as if leaders of it. It was a strange moment, as we were cut off in this creative bubble, and not communicating with the press, yet they were talking like we were the future of rock and roll. Perhaps we were.
When going through the archives for the anniversary of Light & Magic we found photos and video we had literally never seen. CD-Rs, a mountain of cuttings, MiniDV, VHS and Betacam tapes, and years’ worth of tour footage. All this documentation that our label sent us and we didn’t even look at. We wanted to use the found material to convey not just how it looked and sounded, but how that moment felt. It is just one of many untold stories.”

Ladytron Celebrate 20th Anniversary Of Light&Magic With Unseen Video

Liverpool UK Group Celebrate 20th Anniversary of Light&Magic

Release unseen archive teaser reel, short film, and Unreleased Music Video

Further unseen material to be released until the anniversary of the Album’s release on September 17

August 2022 – Liverpool UK group Ladytron are celebrating the 20th anniversary of what many consider their definitive album, 2002’s Light&Magic (Nettwerk).

To accompany it, the group have assembled unseen archive material from the time, including a teaser reel, a short film of them recording the album in Los Angeles, and an unreleased music video for the title track, shot on slide film, which had lay incomplete for two decades. Further unseen material will follow until the anniversary of the album’s release on September 17.

“When we released Light&Magic it was expected that the title track would be a later single, and would therefore need a video clip of its own. But we were on tour and didn’t know how it would be done. We had all this beautiful slide film shot and envisaged animating it in some way, like a 1970s science fiction title sequence – Sapphire and Steel or something like that. We disappeared on the road, plans changed, and ideas were forgotten. Twenty years later here it is.”

The video premiered at Under The Radar magazine. Read full article here.