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Vice Blog

VISUAL HEAD MUSIC MEETS MUSICAL HEAD VISUALS

Hey there. Last we spoke I was

jawing on about a weird VHS tape

my friend the porn actress gave me. Today I'm here with another bizarro tape, this time from Human Resources and Eyebodega.

If you're unfamiliar, Human Resources is a guy who makes really good music, and Eyebodega are two dudes who have their hands in a whole bunch of different creative pots. The two camps recently got together and scrounged up a lot of weird, sampled media, on purpose and frequently at random, then mutated it until something beautiful happened.

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The result is a 20-minute VHS tape called Saving Lady/Pauline, with Human Resources providing the sounds and Eyebodega conjuring the visuals. The overall effect of this journey through hyper-stimulus is a kind of shimmering fever trance that involves characters from Mexican home movies and alien abduction reenactments chanting at each other and chasing money, melted with snatches of terrible indie rock press releases and MySpace spam read aloud to a confused audience. Sounds great, I know.

I sat down with Jeremy Krinsley of Human Resources and Rob Chabebe and Joe Perez of Eyebodega for a screening of their collaboration. It just so happened that this screening was the first time the trio had all watched the tape together at the same time, so it turned into just as much a conversation between the guys who made the tape (if not more) as a conversation between the artists and myself.

Vice: How did this tape come about?
Joe Perez (Eyebodega): Well, Jeremy asked us if we’d like to do a music video for him, so we did. We didn’t want to stop there though, so we just did the whole EP.
Jeremy (Human Resources): Basically, the EP is a mix of pop music with chance radio stuff, so a lot of the melodic elements are rhythmically sampled by chance. Obviously, doing things this way meant that a lot of stuff didn’t work out, but some of it turned out really sick. There’s a lot of shit going on at once.

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Rob Chabebe (Eyebodega): We used elements of chance because it’s the sort of project where we could do whatever we wanted to. We had tons of awesome footage, but we weren’t sure yet what we would use it for, so we thought we’d use it in this project and just go with it.

It seems like the visual elements were made exclusively with sampled material. What’s the appeal of working strictly with sampled and found footage?
It’s sort of challenging because you’re limited, so you sort of have to go with it.
Joe: I’m a really big fan of just working with whatever you have. The appeal of working with found footage, for me, is that there are so many ways to manipulate it—you can match it up with other stuff and introduce news ideas to it.

What do you look for in a piece of video when you’re digging up samples?
Mainly interesting movement. Something that could maybe say something unintentionally. You’re trying to collide ideas.
Rob: Chance is important. If you have that element of chance from the start, you don’t know where it’s going to go, but you can guide yourself through it and you’ll end up somewhere.

I’m interested in what happens when you try to layer or marry at gunpoint two unrelated pieces of media. I like when two pieces of sound or video are taken out of time and context, or are degraded or mutated and made to mean something else.
I think the way things look is important and effects everybody a certain way. I think colors are just as important as content. There’s always different options of what you can do when you degrade it and it becomes something else. You can shape it and use it to your advantage.
Jeremy: The thing I really like about this video is that it matches up so well with the stuff that I was doing—visual head music. I don’t know how much you thought about that when you went into it, but it totally feels like that.

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Joe: I don’t think we were thinking too hard about it. We mainly just screw around until it works and then take the ideas somewhere else.
Rob: I always have a certain idea and I sort of know what I want to use and I’ll plan ahead, but I definitely let the process happen as well, and that makes it more fun for me, personally, and also for whoever’s going to watch it.
Jeremy: If we’re already making something that’s going to be a conceptual project on an audio and visual level, it makes sense that you would conceptualize it as you go. There’s so much going on that you’d have to watch it a few times before you could approach what we’re hearing or seeing as we’re making it because it’s so dense.
Rob: It’s overstimulating.
Jeremy: There’s also something about the lo-fi aesthetic as a means to an end. It’s not just having shitty equipment though, there’s something else to it.

I find that if you’re forced to work with shitty equipment for a long time, you develop your own aesthetic by polishing whatever comes out of the shitty equipment as hard as you can. It adds a different texture than if you were working with something more precise.
I am certainly not working with a professional studio, and I know you guys are not necessarily. Is everything you use taken from VHS footage or what?
Joe: It’s mostly VHS.

Where do you find materials? I’m particularly interested in how Eyebodega’s videos are assembled since it’s two people putting together the work.

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Rob: We do this thing where I have footage, and Joey has footage, and it’s sort of like it builds… it’s like no questions asked, let’s just put it together and see what we like.
Joe: My grandfather amassed hundreds of hours of recorded TV throughout the 80s and 90s, most of it I still have around. My favorite is a pile of tapes with the original broadcasts of every Mets game from the ’87 playoffs and World Series, sleazy commercials included, a few of which are totally warped and garbled and fun to watch. He was also way into UFOs, b-movies, and wacky shit like that, so that’s what I started out experimenting with shortly after realizing that I wasn’t having much fun filming and editing DIY shows with my crappy gear all the time. Leaning on found footage as a building block feels right to me if it can connect to an idea and take on a new life.
Jeremy: I record a lot of my chance samples off of the radio. For example, I hit record on a tape player while my friend was playing Call of Duty with some WFMU jazz show going in the background, then I played it back and realized it was in the same key as a song I was working on and fit perfectly. The last song on the EP is literally just readings of the worst press releases from bands. I used to do that live and people didn’t get what I was doing, so I stopped doing it.
Rob: Incidentally, there’s a guy in the VHS tape who looks like Jeremy who we put in over that part. So we’re mocking Jeremy while he mocks these terrible press releases. It’s also mocking this one guy who used to spam Jeremy on MySpace.
Jeremy: He’s still spamming me. Also, he found out that the song existed and knows we are making fun of him on this record, and also on Twitter. He’s got his fingers in every social organ. After we put that song out he abruptly followed and unfollowed us on everything. I think if you looked up Greg Leason you could make this whole post about Greg Leason. It’d be really funny. “His music combines the industrial production of Nine Inch Nails with the melodic piano of Tori Amos.”

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That is what is known in the industry as “high-concept.”
It’s more like a schlocky, terrible taste in music pitch. What’s so funny about it to me is that people who write press releases like that think it will appeal to a music critic.

It’s nice when someone takes the underpromise/overdeliver approach.
That’s rarely found though, or it’s people who no one else will check up on. I don’t think there any big bands who don’t oversell themselves for the most part. Or young bands who are trying to make it, they always talk about “taking the next level." My favorite is the Smith Westerns dude who is really preoccupied with “climbing the ladder.”

Rob: I forgot to mention: Monterrey, Mexico is really important to this project.
Jeremy: Oh, yeah! We all went down to Monterrey for MTYMX. That’s when all those songs were written.
Rob: Yeah. So when Jeremy gave us the music I had Monterrey on my mind. I was like, this video should have something to do with Mexico. So a lot of the footage has this clown guy, he’s a Mexican clown guy, and there’s this part with a guy in a Spongebob suit. This guy down there puts on these costumes for parties and dances around and can’t see a single thing. There’s also footage shot from a car in the 80s of somebody driving around the streets of Monterrey.

Human Resources are playing at Shea Stadium tonight at 8pm. A copy of Saving Lady/Pauline VHS can be had here, and you can listen to the whole EP for free here.

MATTHEW CARON