Project Watch II: Brett Underwood and Née Make Videos, With a Pinch of First Punch

We return with another edition of Project Watch, with brings together diverse artists and projects under a single umbrella. This week, video’s a thread that runs throughout, with local video house First Punch playing a role in both stories. We’ll start with a unique video brought to the web just last week…

Brett Underwood and Kevin Belford with “ORGANIZATION”

Over the years, Brett Underwood’s had a hand in a variety of interesting endeavors. He books shows for the Schlafly Tap Room. He’s been a program host on KDHX, via the late, great No Show. He’s read at poetry events of all stripes, all over town. And he’s now committed a provocative, poetic video to the worldwide web one that brings together a host of diverse talents. That piece, “ORGANIZATION,” involves a blend of talents, from Underwood’s words and vocals to the arresting closing titles of Ryan Frank.

It’s a sweet piece of surrealist-inspired video art. And one that might signal a move in that direction for Underwood. In order to find out more, we talked to the poet himself, along with Kevin Belford, the renowned local illustrator, author and blues music researcher, who helped shoot the video. (And who continually deflected attention to the others involved.)

What initiated all this? How’d it come together?

Underwood: The piece hit 52nd City first, as you know. At some point, Pat Sajak Assassins wanted it for one of their albums. I went to Joe Freeman’s house and recorded it, though they did all kinds of things to the sound. We had the audio from that. At some point, Kevin heard it and we started goofing around with it. He came over one day and I put a bag on my head. The piece came from my sitting in my cluttered apartment, thinking of taking a walk, but not doing it yet. I felt baffled in the space. And I envisioned this space, of things stacked on things. A light coming through the window. My walking through that. Those ideas started coming from there. Then Kevin brought a camera. We eventually brought that to Bob Silvey of Moth.

Belford: Moth studios is a big deal. They do really big stuff.

Underwood: They do, they have commercial campaigns.

Belford: Carson (Minow’s) crew deserves credit, too.

Underwood: They do, they’re thanked on there, too. They’re on the credits. Obviously, I had ideas with it being a surrealist piece. We used stock images from the Internet.

Belford: It was found art. We talked about sources. The word Dada pops out, so we were thinking about that. We wound up leaning more towards Fluxus, the ’60s version of Dada. It’s much more playful this way. Collecting pieces of tattered, scattered stuff from the streets. It’s an assemblage, a collage. (Brett) put assembled people from top-notch pros to shmucks like me.

What’s the response that gotten, so far?

Underwood: Well, I got one back today. It said that “I’m really bad about reading poetry. I can react a lot better if I hear it and see some images accompanying it.” Makes me think I should do a children’s book.

Belford: Remember, it went out just last night…

Underwood: Sam Coffey said, “I don’t know what it is, but it’s not boring. It moves along.” I haven’t shown it to many people yet, but I will put it up somewhere, probably on my blog as well as YouTube. Aaron Belz said it was great and he encouraged me to talk to the publisher BlazeVox. They really encourage you to do podcasts and videos and stuff like that. I wasn’t really my idea to do the video. But it’s obviously good to have as many different forms of your work out there as possible. Kevin took the bull by the horns in just coming over with a camera. And it just happened that I’d gotten mugged that week, and here we were going out on the street…

Belford: It really did take longer than expected. But things need time to gestate.

Underwood: You could probably knock something out in 48 hours. But everybody’s busy. I don’t know about that, really. There’s a lot of graphics with this. It’s pretty thick. What do you think Kevin, with all the stuff you do? It’s a lot more than taking a camera out to a park.

Belford: We didn’t want it too slick. We wanted it to stay childlike. It’s a Picasso thing, you go out so far and come back around again. That was our thinking.

Underwood: We did have some discussions and you told me I should start doing that on my own, keep it real lo-fi and dirty.

Belford: It’s true. You get that stuff on your computer, some right software. You push a button and you get an effect. That couldn’t be done with this. Don’t give me too much credit on this. I saw that poem and thought, “This is just too cool.” It’s true to itself and to you. It’s totally Brett.

With something like this, there’s the inevitable “What’s next”?

Underwood: There are a bunch of people I’d like work with. I recently ran into Roy Zurick and Zlatko Cosic at SoHa Gallery and we were talking about video. I didn’t come out and say I wanted to do something with them, but Zlatko does do this kind of stuff. It would be nice to pay a few people money to do this and do it that way. There’s a lot going on for people. And it’s not like there’s such a stall in the economy that Moth and First Punch are asking me to come over and play.

Belford: To help keep the lights on.

Underwood: I won’t be able to help keep their lights on. Maybe keep the candles going. But, yeah, a couple people have told me this should be a series. Well, of course. I also need an agent and a chauffeur.

Tell us more about the children’s book idea?

Underwood: I’m seeing a lot of comic books, cartoons that you understand much more as an adult than when you’re a child. Even Where the Wild Things Are. So I don’t know. I know a lot of artists. It’s a matter of asking. Kevin wants to do it, but I haven’t asked him yet.

Belford: (Gale of laughter.)

Underwood: I haven’t had a lot of thoughts other than the size of the book. It should be Dr. Seuss-sized.

Here’s the link to “ORGANIZATION”; before you click, be aware it contains some mild adult content.

Kristin M. Dennis and Née

Née is the principal musical project for Kristin M. Dennis, though she keeps an active hand in a variety of other projects, both job- and artistically-related. A good deal of digital ink could be spilled on some of those endeavors, but we’ll limit today’s discussion to Née and some upcoming works.

For starters, there’s a show at the new venue Plush, coming up on Thursday, March 1, with Yacht. This will feature the group’s new, expanded lineup: Dennis on vocals and synth; David Beeman on guitar and keys; Mic Boshans on drums and percussion and Lex Herbert on keys. They’re also releasing a record, funded by a recent Kickstarter project. The album’s going to feature a track called “Pretty Girls,” now available on the group’s bandcamp page. That’s the track that the group will be turning into a video later this month.

Interestingly, we caught up with Dennis at one of her part-time employers, The Royale, just moments after catching Underwood for the interview above. Over lunch, she discussed a few of the upcoming wrinkles to the emerging Née story.

This time out, you’ll have the new lineup, yes? How’s that coming together?

Yes, it’s the full, four-piece band. This’ll be our second show in this iteration. And it’s been interesting, it’s been really tough. We’re having to learn the songs again, changing everything from the way we used to play them. I’m playing a completely different part. And then there’s logistics, which have been tough to figure out. But I think it’ll be worth it. It gives us a better sound.

Talk about the success of the Kickstarter process.

On one hand, Kickstarter got us everything that we wanted to get out of it. We got the money to make the record. We got people excited about it coming out. We’ve got a ton of merchandise that I’ve personally made, and is ready to come out, so it’ll be cool to give back in that way to everyone who was interested. On the other hand, the process of making the record has been unpredictable. We fell on some difficult times, needing to cancel studio time due to emergencies, etc. It’s awesome, because we get to make the record, but it’s tough, too, because we really don’t want to disappoint people.

I’ve always been curious about this aspect of Kickstarter: you’re really extending yourself by doing that. You’re putting your name and work out there and hoping that people respond to it.

No, that’s right. I totally questioned it when the idea originally came up. I had done some research because Old Lights had been talking about doing one. We put a very low bar there, just the minimum to make the record. We only needed to raise $2,000. You worry, “What if we don’t make it? What if no one likes my band?” Then your hopes and dreams are crushed to oblivion! The balance came by just creating, on the front end, a very accessible presentation. Maybe if you didn’t know us, but your friend did, we’d still be able for you to understand it. We did a video, all that stuff. And we created awards where people with interest would be receiving hand-designed stuff that they’d like. After that, we kept our fingers crossed. We offered the normal stuff, digital downloads of the records, vinyl copies, t-shirts, all that stuff. But we also had a limited edition, glow-in-the-dark version of the vinyl. Those will be awesome, I can’t wait for that. We also wanted to do some weird, awesome stuff. I have an entire season of the old NBC show Dinosaurs. And with that, we’ll be watching the whole season with one of the backers. It’ll be a party, weird and interesting.

You’ve obviously showed a lot of interested in music video.

Well, I’ve always loved film and especially music video. I’ve thought that that’s what I really wanted to do. I went to film school to try to do that. In high school, I thought I’d move to L.A. and would make films for the rest of my life. But really, music’s always been the main concern. I’m obsessed with music videos, I can sit and watch them for hours and hours. You have three and a half minutes to make something very artful, to depict some story. We’re going to be shooting one at the end of the month, with First Punch. We’ve worked with them at our (Native Sound) studio and we’re friends. That’ll take a lot of the pressure off, for me to also have to shoot and edit it. We’re taking it to the next level this time. They’ll take my concepts and shoot it and edit it in the way that I want. I can sit and direct in the way that I want, without worrying about shooting and lighting and those things. That’s not my forte. We’ll have a full crew, six dancers, plus the band. Full costumes and everything. When I was drawing the storyboards, I had “This is Kristin, this is what Kristin is going to do.” Even in pre-production, I’m almost embarrassed by it. I’m having to play the role of a pop star in this one. It’ll push the limits of my pride and ego, which will be a challenge for me. I wanna do a video for every song on the record, thought. And I’ve got ideas for videos for Old Lights, Beth Bombara and us. If I didn’t like music so much, I’d just make videos!

How are you looking ahead, in terms of a relationship to St. Louis, opposed to the rest of the world?

Inside St. Louis, there’s a good community of musicians, who are actually nice to each other for the most part. At least the people I know. “Hey, man, can I need to borrow something. Can I?” “Well, of course you can.” That’s all cool. I playing shows in town, but playing too many shows here is not going to take us where we want to be. It builds a better band, internally, but really the effort at this point is to make an awesome record, make videos and tour. I think that’s the most realistic way to look at it. That’s not a diss on St. Louis. We have a great playing scene, but we don’t have the distribution and releasing scene that we need to support all of us. Does that sound horrible? It shouldn’t. The more shows we do in St. Louis, the better we’ll be live. But we don’t wanna be a St. Louis band, we be an everybody band.

Some months back, thesouthsideofluck.com caught up with Dennis and Beeman during the recording of the song “Pretty Girls.” The piece is shot and edited by Andy Alton.