If you’ve not seen Kriss Kyle’s ‘Kaleidoscope’ video by now, then look a few centimetres down your screen, move that cursor over to the play button, and enjoy what will no doubt be the best five minutes of your entire week.
Seriously, do it now. Right now. We’ll wait. We could do with another cup of coffee anyway. We’ve forgotten our own surnames.
Awesome, right? Kaleidoscope is one of the best BMX features we’ve seen in a long time, and one of the most creative bike features we’ve seen since Danny MacAskill’s ‘Imaginate’, which as you can ‘imagine-ate’, sorry, it has been getting a lot of comparisons to.
The feature stands out as a landmark video in BMX. One that will be watched for years on end, age incredibly well and become a point of reference for anyone asked a question along the lines of “so why do you ride BMX?”
“I didn’t care how hard it would be to get the song. I said I’d pay for it if I needed to…”
One of the most important factors of the video, or any video for that matter? The music! No edit in any sport is complete until it’s got the perfect soundtrack behind it, and that certainly holds true for Kaleidoscope. So, lucky Kriss managed to dig out one of the best tunes we’ve heard in an age.
The song is by an artist called ‘Portugal. The Man’. Yes, that is a full stop after ‘Portugal’ and yes, it is quite a confusing band name to read for the first time.
We assume there was too much confusion between man and country to just call the group ‘Portugal’, but then again, that opens the door to ask why the three-piece didn’t call the thing ‘Portugal. The Band/Group/Triplet’. They are great though.
ANYWAY. To summarise, we don’t know exactly why, but the people behind the tune are called ‘Portugal. The Man’ and the awesome song is called ‘All Your Light (Times Like These)’. Check it out.
How did Kriss come across the tune? We asked him exactly that, and the sweet video from Red Bull at the bottom of the piece can tell you even more about the origins of the soundtrack!
“To be honest, we found it pretty quick,” Kriss told us, when we talked to him ahead of the big release. “I was actually really surprised about that. I had been looking for a song for a while, but as soon as I found that one, I was like ‘if we can get this and use this, that will be unbelievable!’
“I didn’t care about how hard it would be and I said I’d pay for the song if I needed to. I absolutely loved it.
“Everyone who I made listen to it agreed and thought ‘this is the one’. We went to contact the group and they were really interested and really keen to get involved and they were a fan of my riding and stuff like that. It couldn’t have been a better outcome!”