Drainolith – “You Paid For It” (Official Video)
Posted under: Here is another premiere of a fresh new video for you to chew on. This one is from Drainolith, the solo project of Alexander Moskos (AIDS Wolf) and it is probably the most bizarre thing you’ll watch today. Per Alex’s request, I’m including an interview that Les Klés, a Montreal zine writer, conducted with Alex and the video artist Joshua Bastien. Check out the vid and the read what the guys had to say about it.
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LK: Ok so let’s start with the song itself. “Moskos,” is it really about prostitution, like The Wire reviewer said?
AM: Nah, unless we’re talking about the crew buying ad space in order to get a rub n’ tug in the avant-rock section. (Alex laughs, no one else does.) It’s more about waiting for Dom, though,
LK: Yeah, tell us about this Dominiq Alexander.
AM: A friend of ours, she’s a musician and interior designer, she’s in the Drainolith live trio right now as well, but she went through a dark zone recently that everyone knows about but wont talk about, so everyone thinks the song is about that…but really its about how Dom had this reputation for being later than a motherfucker. Also she sings on the 7” version of the song. When I was in Delzoppo’s studio, having a hard time singing the parts I kept saying, “Dom where are you when I need you?!” It just kinda ended up in the final version.
JB: Yeah I had a much more personal reading of that lyric though. It was more significant than that to me. I was half way through making the video and Shapiro had really gotten me into a deep, hashed, headspace, and it just hit me hard, I thought: “Oh shit, the song is about Dom but I’ve interpreted it differently. Maybe I should start over.”
AM: It’s really about Waiting for Domo, in like, the super Modo-style lobby of a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe building. And being like “I feel like Im standing in a square on some graph paper, where’s Dom!?!” (laughs) But being on tour with Chloe and Yannick in Europe, I spent some serious time alone in some hotels. That is some solipsistic shit, man.
LK: Josh, when Moskos asked you for a video, did you have an idea or did he give you guidelines?
JB: Yeah, I had an idea.
AM: I inherently trust Josh to blow a guy’s mind. No guidelines needed for that.
JB: I wanted it to be Alex sitting and talking in time lapse, Alex is gesturing spinning a narrative, and all these faces and other gestures are all kind of coming out of that… but then all these assemblages get swept up into one voice, that’s represented by a mouth. Its layers of narratives, speaking, unfolding, juxtaposed, repeating then kind of zeroing on this …
AM: A woman’s mouth singing the lame-assed, old male-gaze, protestant-guilt vocals. But it’s Ms Desmond’s mouth. The sexiest set of teeth in Quebec and that’s saying something, man, Les Quebecoise have some rhizomatic-level pearly whites.
JB: We shot large cooking bowls full of egg yokes for hours one night. At one point we had Tara (Desmond) singing through large sheets of saran wrap covered in egg yokes. I wanted the eggs to represent incubation, man…but I wanted it really to…Im influenced by Deleuze’s ideas of repetition.
AM: You mean by Mark E. Smith’s idea of repetition (laughs, no one else does)
JB: No matter how many times something repeats it is never the same, each instance of repetition is different, at least to some degree. Even in a purely digital realm like this video. Each instance of repetition has a possibility of difference, of a new meaning.
AM: Even now, in a world that abhors meaning. Hell, that EATS MEANING (yelling, for no reason)
JB: Even now. This present. Where everything meets and gets hybridized.
LK: You mentioned avant-garde film when we walked over…
JB: I wanted the video to be like a 60s or 70’s psychedelic light show, but also, like 60s and 70’s structural film, where there is no real meaning, just this gorgeous reflection on the medium and its limits. So I really wanted to work with that, layering the same footage on top of itself, running at 300 times the speed or 600 times the speed but the same footage.
AM: It Creates time problems. Dude, my new band: Time Problem….But its like the Current 93 LP that’s just every existent Current 93 record up until that point sped up and layered on top of each other. Unlistenable.
JB: Or Oswald’s Grayfolded.
AM: Yeah 40 years of Dark Star solos folded into one moment. And after you listen to it, everything else, even Morbid Angel sounds like Grayfolded for some strange reason. Talk about the present holding all these layers.
JB: There’s difference in each repetition. In a traditional understanding of repetition there would not be any difference between each instance. The video really aims to get at that. And then this mouth, in real time, speaks.
AM: That’s where I get lost, and confused, and say “Josh is an original nutter!”
JB: Like you quoted the lady from Not Not Fun Records saying, “Its so passé to try and be original” Even nutters now are the same as the original.
AM: Original Nuttah! Nuttah! (Sings a bass line)
LK: Anything else either of you want to say about the video.
AM: The avant-garde is dead, forever, buried. No original. Just infinite originals.
JB: I’m stoked.
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Drainolith‘s album Fighting! is out now via Spectrum Spools.
