Steve McLaughlin’s “Run For Your Life” takes all of the Beatles’ officially released UK albums and compresses them into 61 minutes by speeding them up 800%. The result is trippy, maddening and at times quite beautiful. Of course, it would be impossible to do anything to the Beatles music without slivers of beauty jutting out here and there.

McLaughlin’s Beatles methy mix has been wedded to video excerpts from Bollywood and Lollywood films in addition to fragments of documentaries, experimental films, fractals and animation. Admittedly, an hour of this music/video mashup can be both nervewracking and trance-inducing. But, it’s worth taking the trip.

The Bollywood bits meld nicely with the music. There are awkward moments, but I imagine getting a tight edit with music at this speed would take many many hours, if not days.

I don’t know much about Indian musical time signatures, but the Beatles on super fast forward, with no fixed tempos and various speeds, reminds me of the battling of sitars and tablas in raga breakdowns and Hindi movie soundtracks with a nervous condition.

Albums featured:

Please Please Me
With the Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles for Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles (White Album)
Yellow Submarine
Abbey Road
Let It Be

‘Magical Mystery Tour” is not included because it was not released as an album in the UK. It was released as two EPs.

While McLaughlin’s Beatles mix has been available for awhile as a free download on the Internet, this is first video mashup to the music I’ve seen.