MALIA STRIP DRIVE (Les Roberts, 2019)

The video for Malia Strip Drive was fumbled together while on a family holiday to Crete in 2016. A drive back-and-forth along the Strip, along with the briefest of wanders down to the beach, was about the extent of our engagement with the resort. For reasons that remain a little sketchy, I decided it might be a worthwhile exercise if we did a three-way 'phantom ride' back along the Strip using individual smartphones (except mine as I was driving). A few weeks later I edited the footage together to make a six minute video. Synchronous sound (banal chit-chat from inside our hire car) was of course never part of the plan for the finished output. However, as my initial ideas for a soundtrack come to nothing the project was shelved, only to be returned to in the summer of 2019, spurred on by a return trip to Crete that year (the west side of the island this time, so no Malia). Having figured that what I needed to do was offset the ambient soundscape of Malia at night with the rather more prosaic visual landscape of sleepy mid-afternoon, in the absence of first-hand ethnographic material of the Strip at its hedonistic peak-time, I ventured instead onto YouTube. I quickly discovered an abundance of resources from which I then set about harvesting a collage of sound.