A small milestone
300 Videos on KleinTones
Three hundred published videos feel less like a large number to me than a reason to stop for a moment and look back: at music, images, films, experiments, detours — and at a great many hours of work.
01
What goes into a video
For many of these videos, the work begins long before the editing. Music is composed, arranged, performed and recorded. Then come the images or films: archival footage, paintings, my own photographs, abstract animation or landscapes. Material has to be found, selected and shaped into something that belongs with the music.
After that come editing, synchronization, transitions, titles, descriptions, thumbnails and, quite often, questions about sources, licences and copyright. Some videos are comparatively simple to make. Others grow over days, weeks or even months. What finally appears on YouTube as a single click is often the result of many small decisions.
02
Not made for the mainstream
KleinTones was never intended as an attempt to follow a particular format or a currently successful formula. I am interested in connections: original music with painting, archival film, nature, cities, abstract imagery or personal stories. There is jazz, classical influence, improvisation, electronic sound, and music that does not fit comfortably into a single category.
That also means these videos do not always live where the largest audiences are easiest to find. A ten-minute art film, a quiet composition, or a musical dialogue with Turner, Friedrich, Van Gogh or historical footage competes with very different forms of attention.
03
A small sign of hope
That is why I am especially pleased by something I think I have begun to notice recently: more people seem to be finding this work — and some do not stop at a single video, but continue into other music and films on the channel.
I do not want to turn that into a grand success story. It is far too early for that, and numbers are not the main reason I make this work anyway. But it is a small sign of hope: perhaps there is an audience, beyond the mainstream, for music and films that are allowed to grow slowly, attempt something individual, and resist fitting immediately into a familiar category.
300 videos — and perhaps only now is it becoming visible what kind of world they can form together.
04
300 is not a finish line
So the 300th video does not feel like a finish line. It feels more like a point from which I can look back for a moment and then continue. Some of the projects I work on today would have been difficult for me to imagine when I published the first video. Other ideas have stayed with me for years and continue to change.
What has remained is the pleasure of making music and finding images for it — and the hope that somewhere there are people who are interested in exactly this mixture too.
Thank you to everyone who listens, watches, comments, returns, or shares one of these videos with someone else.