The second episode of Insight’s hugely successful Dopamine series begins with a love-spurned Scuba diver, hopped up on snuff, leaving anguished voicemail messages on his ex-lover’s phone from underwater.
The tirade is a deluge of lucid language – energetic, magnetic and captivating. Where it intersects with surfing or selling product is ambiguous, but who cares? It’s different, exotic and features almost-perfect breasts in the lounging-beneath-the-surface scene.
The monologue is beautifully minimal: written and performed by Cottonmouth Texas, a white spoken word/hip-hop dude from California whose biggest claim to fame – until now – was doing some gigs at Lollapalooza back in 1997.
Spliced with Cottonmouth’s lovesick ramblings is some medium-fi surfing chopped to a retro-psychedelic-surf-punk soundtrack. The Black lips, Tame Impala, Bobby Fuller are bands you’re unlikely to find on a commercial station, nor will they appear on the iTunes homepage. It is fringe music for those in the know. Insight are in the know.
As for the team, they ain’t no title contenders but they can still slice through pockets with the precision and ease of a Third World seamstress. Team rider Kai Otton says it is the exclusivity of the Insight team that gives it prestige. “On the Gold Coast recently, other companies had like 400 sponsored grommets paddling around annoying everyone. Steds and I are Insight’s only riders in Australia.”
When the time does come for Insight’s riders to do their thing, they do so not in the obligatory slut holes of North Narrabeen and Duranbah. The rippable left Otton surfs at the beginning of the clip is in Taiwan. Otton recalls fondly a land of cultural enrichment and poor infrastructure.
“It was the Chinese New Year when we were there. You could have let off a bomb and no one would have known. The fireworks went for about four days, which meant four days without sleep.“
Having failed to book a flight to the wave, it was then into a van for a picturesque five-hour drive through the emerald Taiwanese escarpments. But alas, the Chinese New Year had clogged the two-lane highway, and for the next 17 hours Otton’s hire car didn’t get out of first gear.
Otton describes the wave as “Lennox-esque,” relying on sand to build up around its boulders to function. It is also not the only wave on the island. “On the way there we saw some crazy set-ups. I wanted to surf one of them but we ran out of light.”
via Stab Magazin
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