VIDEOS
Val Jeanty: How To Make An Earth, 2019
“How to make an earth” is a music video for the musician Val Jeanty, assembled from hundreds of clips of found internet footage. I met Val when she participated in the WOMANPRODUCER series that I co-curated at National Sawdust in 2016. We recorded Val’s live performance from the event, a jaw-dropping work of live percussion, sampling, and mixing. Listening to Val perform feels like witnessing big weather or some other impressive act of nature. I came up with the idea to make a video to accompany a section of the recording and proceeded to amass a huge quantity of clips of internet footage of natural disasters and acts of human creation and destruction.
The Bath, 2018
The Bath accompanied the 2018 European release of Brand New Abyss, by The Blow. The song, an 11-minute experimental instrumental track, was our European single, and the fact that Europeans welcomed this as a promotional asset gave us a real sense of freedom. I and Melissa Dyne made the video together while at an artist residency in Zaragoza, Spain. The image is our silhouettes playing some of the electronic instruments that we use in live performances. The knobs and wires on the left are a video synthesizer that is being used to manipulate the colors and shapes in the projection. We shot about fifty versions of this video, each one resulting in a different visual composition. This one had the vibe.
The Blow: The Woman You Want Her To Be, 2017
“The woman you want her to be” was released in 2017 as the second video in the promotion of the album Brand New Abyss. We knew all along that we wanted to make a video for our rap about making one’s way in the patriarchy, but it posed a challenge: how to create imagery of “a woman” without using imagery of specific individuals? The idea of a hand had been in my mind for a while and once it occurred to me that it could be walking, like the 1980’s commercials for the phone book, referencing the universal femme experience of walking in public, I knew I had it.
The video was shot in one take using a jogger’s conveyor belt and a crew of people rotating panels of artwork in the background. The “woman” is performed by Melissa Dyne, who strengthened her fingers growing up playing the cello.
The Blow: Think About Me, 2016
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The Blow: From The Future, 2013
From The Future was the first single from The Blow’s 2013 self-titled album. I came up with the idea of a book of the sky as a way of visually illustrating the message of the song, spelled out in the chorus lyrics: “The moon screams in my ear, ‘Stay up all night! Day is fake and you know I’m right, it shoots all that excessive light and just distracts us from the facts, we’re floating in a vast expanse of black.’”
The Blow: Ask Me, 2011
Melissa Dyne and I created this video in an Atlantic City hotel room in 2011. It was used for an announcement that we were collaborating on producing a record together as The Blow, and accompanied a lecture and performance tour for the show “Songs For Other People,” in which I told a fictional narrative about songwriting for Lindsay Lohan.
The Blow: Exclusive Interview with “Hey Boy”, 2006
I made this video in 2006 to accompany the release of the album Paper Television. In promoting our album I found it interesting that there was so much focus on images of us as the makers of it, a necessity I suppose as music can’t be photographed. Personifying one of the songs and giving it a platform for exposure seemed funny to me; it turned out he actually had a lot to say.