Category: Video

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Paris’ Comma Period Shares Hypnotic “Presets for Life”

Vivian Morrison is a Paris-based electronic music producer, artist, remixer and creative mastermind behind emerging project Comma Period. Morrison initially started the project to remix a couple of songs for French multi-instrumentalist Colleen.

Comma Period quickly developed into a project rooted in retro-futuristic escapism, cyberpunk loneliness and synthwave nostalgia for a future that will never be and we’ll never see. The project’s debut EP Ruin Porn was released earlier this year. Thematically, the EP’s material is informed by the modern fascination with ruins — both ancient and modern. But it’s also about the horror of the ruins of Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere, and our powerlessness to stop the ongoing madness of our world.

The EP’s latest single “Presets for Life (Radio Edit)” is a hypnotic, industrial banger featuring layers upon layers of glistening and woozy synth oscillations paired with skittering beats. While sonically recalling Snap!’s “Rhythm Is A Dancer” and JOVM mainstay LutchamaK, the song as the emerging Parisian explains, ask a couple of questions: Wouldn’t it be nice if we had presets in real life, like in music software? And those presets would tell us how to behave, how to love, how to live and how to die?

Edited by Morrison, the accompanying video for “Presets for Life” features open source videos available on Pexels, and follows a young boy exploring a suburban ruin. Throughout, the video’s imagery gently undulates to the music, adding a lysergic feel to the visual.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Razor Braids Share a “120 Minutes” MTV-Like Ode to the Uncertainty of New Love

Brooklyn-based indie outfit Razor Braids — Hollye Bynum (lead vocals, bass), Janie Peacock (lead guitar), Jilly Karande (vocal, rhythm guitar) — had a breakthrough 2023: Their full-length debut, I Could Cry Right Now If You Wanted To was released to critical praise from the likes of BrooklynVegan, Paper, Vanyaland, Creem Magazine and others. Adding to a big year, the band opened for The National, Foo Fighters, and Worriers, and they made the rounds of the festival circuit, playing sets at that year’s SXSW and Boston Calling.

The band’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Big Wave is slated for a June 2024 release. The album reportedly sees the band furthering their dedication to tightly layered vocals and emotionally reflective lyrics. Big Wave‘s third and latest single “Berate Me” features a dreamy and contemplative introduction, quickly followed by a prototypical grunge song structure held together by the crunch power chords and the big hooks that bring back memories of 120 Minutes MTV-era alt rock, like Live Though This-era Hole, Veruca Salt and others. The song conveys the woozy unease of starting a new relationship — with the all the prerequisite fears and uncertainties that we all have throughout our lives: Will this end like the other times? Will this be better? Will it be worse? What if it was always me? What if I just choose wrong? And so on in that sickening and all too familiar cycle of doubt. But it also captures a narrator, who has done some work on themselves and acknowledges they deserve and need better than what they’ve had in the past.

“’Berate Me’ is about entering a new romantic relationship with someone and the anxiety and baggage you bring along with you,” Razor Braids’ Bynum explains. “The healing done from past experiences has led you to the realization that you should be treated better than you’ve been. You recognize the patterns not only with past partners, but also within yourself. What is my role in this? What unhealthy behaviors am I exhibiting? It sometimes sucks to be self-aware. There’s this sense of playing it cool and really badass in a new relationship when in fact you’re like shitting your pants. You don’t want to show all your skeletons in the closet.”

Directed, produced, choreographed and edited by Hollye Bynum, the accompanying video for “Berate Me” shows the band’s members dressed in red and in a front of a red background struggling against themselves and forces that would deny them the hard-earned wisdom and peace they’ve fought for.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: The Sweet Kill Shares Brooding and Anthemic “Forbidden”

Pete Mills is a Los Angeles-based singer/songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and creative mastermind behind the solo recording project The Sweet Kill. With The Sweet Kill, Mills focuses on the darker and goth side of post-punk.

Constantly recording and producing material at his own studio, Shadow Zone Sound, Mills wrote The Sweet Kill debut album Darkness with the expressed intention to inspire those lost in the shadows of life. Anchored around cold wave-like synths, post-punk drums, atmospheric guitar and melodic bass, the album’s material channels Editors, Fontaines DC, Joy Division and others while thematically exploring the the soul’s journey between two worlds, asking the question: Are we eternally floating in the ether? Or are we never lost and always found?

“Forbidden,” Nowhere‘s latest single is a brooding and anthemic bit of post punk anchored around glistening and angular guitar tones, swaggering and thunderous beats, a propulsive and melodic bass line and enormous hooks and choruses and an atmospheric, acoustic guitar-driven bridge. The arrangement and production serves as a lush, arena rock friendly bed for Mills plaintive baritone. And while sonically seeming to channel White Lies, Editors, Interpol and others, “Forbidden” tackles love, longing and loss through some Romantic tropes and a lived-in specificity.

Directed by Ellen Hawk and shot in a gorgeous, cinematic black and white, features protagonists, who are outcasts and whose love for each other is fiery and passionate yet forbidden. They’re led to a secret world, which is both an escape and exile, and where they can be both consumed by their love. Sounds like an Edgar Allan Poe story doesn’t it?

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Geneva Jacuzzi Shares a Striking Visual for a Brooding and Retro-futuristic Bop

Geneva Jacuzzi is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist, whose immersive and unhinged performances are considered legendary: they often involve a psychotropic gallery of masks, costumes, confrontation and massive art installations. Her recorded music frequently features catchy hooks and cryptic moods dusted in 4-track grit.

Jacuzzi recently signed to Dais Records, who shared the following about the signing: “As long-time fans of Geneva’s immersive world-building, singular songwriting and unforgettable live performances, we are honored to welcome her to the Dais roster.” She adds, “So excited to join the Dais crew. It’s definitely the coolest label in LA. Exciting new adventures on the horizon!” 

The Los Angeles-based multimedia artist’s latest single “Dry” is a brooding yet swaying bit of 80s retro-futuristic synth pop, anchored around layers of glistening analog synth arpeggios and skittering beats paired with catchy, razor sharp hooks. Jacuzzi’s seemingly detached vocal singing about disconnection and uncertainty ethereally floats over the dreamy arrangement.

“I took a little break from writing music and when I sat down at home to record, ‘Dry’ was the first song to burst out,” Jacuzzi recalls. “The music came together so instantly it’s as if it had been waiting and perfecting itself for years in the ether. The chorus lyrics came that same week after I went on a date with Mike Judge and he never called me back (haha). I wasn’t upset or anything, but I had never been ghosted before and couldn’t help but equate modern love to an appliance you buy on the home shopping network.”

The accompanying video is shot in a strikingly cinematic black and white, and features Geneva suspended upside down in an elaborate art installation-meets-costume, being literally hung out to dry.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Los Bitchos Share Glittery Visual for Disco-Inspired Romp “La Bomba”

Acclaimed London-based instrumental outfit Los Bitchos — Australian-born, Serra Petale (guitar); Uruguayan-born Agustina Ruiz (keytar); Swedish-born, Josefine Jonsson (bass) and London-born Nic Crawshaw (drums) — can trace their origins to meeting at various late-night parties and through mutual friends. Inspired by their individual members’ different upbringings and backgrounds, the acclaimed British outfit have firmly established a genre-blurring and retro-futuristic sound that blends elements of Peruvian chica, Argentine cumbia, Turkish psych, surf rock, and the music each individual member grew up with: 

  • The Uruguayan-born Ruiz had a Latin-American music collection that the members of the band fell in love with

  • The Swedish-born Jonsson “brings a touch of out of control pop,” her bandmates often joke

  • Aussie-born Petale is deeply inspired by her mother’s 70s Anatolian rock records

  • And the London-born Crawshaw played in a number of local punk bands before joining Los Bitchos

“Coming from all these different places,” Los Bitchos’ Serra Petale says, “it means we’re not stuck in one genre and we can rip up the rulebook a bit when it comes to our influences.”

Los Bitchos’ Alex Kapranos-produced, critically applauded, full-length debut, 2022’s Let The Festivities Begin! was recorded at Gallery Studios, and saw the band cementing their reputation for crafting playful, lysergic yet party friendly grooves.

The London-based JOVM mainstays capped off a breakthrough year with two Serra Petale and Javier Weyler-co-produced singles “Tip Tapp” and “Los Chrismos,” their first Christmas-themed composition. Fittingly, “Los Chrismos” is a celebratory party-starting romp built around a psych rock-inspired, dexterous and looping guitar line, atmospheric synths, cumbia rhythms paired with holiday appropriate cheers and shouts. Simply put, the song is a much-needed hope and joy bomb in desperate, uneasy time.

The tracks were released digitally and physically on a flexi-disc, bundled with a red vinyl re-pressing of their debut — for that year’s holiday season..

Building upon a growing profile internationally, the London-based JOVM mainstays released 2023’s PAH! EP, a two-track effort that featured a mischievously, rowdy and downright boozy cover of The Champs‘ oft-covered “Tequila,” a song that has become a fan favorite during the band’s live shows. The EP also featured a reworking of King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard‘s “Trapdoor.”

The British outfit’s latest single, the Oli Barton Wood-produced “La Bomba,” the first bit of new material from the band since last year’s PAH! EP. The track is an hook-driven 80s Turkish psych pop-inspired bop anchored around a shuffling dance floor rhythm, a twangy and looping guitar line, a disco-influenced bass line, some video game-like beats paired with glistening synths and ecstatic shouts.

“‘La Bomba’ is a burst of energy and power! It’s just such a fun song – we started playing it at festivals last summer and the energy felt so good!” The band says in press notes.

“The beginning stabs are what came to me (Serra) first as I was cooking in my kitchen. There’s something quite heroic and powerful about the opening guitar tone and the stabs underneath them. The twangy guitar tone cuts through the chaotic landscape of claps, pumping disco bassline and dreamy swirling synth sounds. The disco era influence is quite evident in this song, and I think the bassline sets the tone perfectly for this. Structurally the song delivers straight into a chorus (as Nile Rodgers said, ‘why wait?’). We wanted to keep this as close to a classic pop structure as possible, everything straight to the point. 

“The cherries on top are the little ping pong drum sounds (think Ring My Bell, Anita Ward) – they just make the track go off and totally emulate the feelings of euphoria and pure energy running through it.”

Directed by the band’s long-term artistic collaborator Tom Mitchell, the accompanying video, features some high-energy, glittery visuals that at points playfully nods at Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The band says of the video “As it’s a high energy, pumping song, we needed to have really dynamic visuals to go with that and bring the song to life. The video has lots of shiny, glitterball moments and moves between performance and surreal segments. We had so much fun with make-up and styling for this video. Josefine saw this thing on Tik Tok where you film in a way which gives the illusion you’re riding a horse, so obviously we had a go and put that in the video last minute on set.”