I had a chance to sit down with Boston’s art rockers Bent Knee to talk about their release of a concert video for “Urban Circus,” below. They talked about when this took place in their career, influences, why there’s a lot more where this came from, and why they’re hellBent on video footage.
Catch them at Hand Forged Works in North Andover, MA on February 28. They will be playing alongside visual artists (and a firespinner)!
Allston Pudding: Tell me about the concert film.
Chris: Back in July we had a Kickstarter campaign to help fund a lot of promotion for our album that came out in November and part of that was to produce a concert film in Davis Square Theater in July of 2014. So we brought in huge camera crews and filmed an entire hour-length concert. Since then, we just rolled out the final release of to our Kickstarter backers and we streamed it over Valentine’s Day weekend and over the next couple months we’ll be posting a lot of songs from that concert.
AP: So the concert film is a component of the Kickstarter.
Chris: The kickstarter was for publicity. Part of that was producing a lot of video content
Ben: The show took place right after we had been on tour for five and a half weeks and so the band was coming back from what was our release tour going into our album release show. We decided, so that we’d have more content and be able to do a better job launching the album, to delay [the release] until November at that point. There’s an interesting energy to the whole video because it was the week after we had gotten back from our longest tour yet and so we had so much built up album release [energy]. It was very powerful.
AP: Since the album was released in November, is the new release of the concert film in order to reintroduce the album.
Chris: Not necessarily. I suppose we’re trying to maintain spotlight on the album, but also a lot of the video content is to attract people to our live shows and showcase who we are and what we do live. The record is super polished and produced. I think it’s a nice antithesis to do this live video which is the content from the album but in this new light.
Gavin: [vocals and keyboard]’s mic stand was falling apart. So there’s a real kind of wild energy to that show and some of our best moments.
AP: In the video you’ve shared [Urban Circus], it begins with a good 30 seconds or so of atempo drum hits and noises. It’s very freeform and fun.
Gavin: Well there’s a pattern to the hits. But the tempo is decided by how much I feel I want to mess with Jessica, the bass player.
Ben: Gavin tries to fake her out, but it’s getting increasingly hard.
Chris: “Urban Circus” is the title of the leading track from our first record. I think what’s exciting about this particular video is that it’s us playing a song that’s had a lot of time to mature and evolve in our live set even though it was on a recording almost four years ago.
AP: Is most of the concert film older stuff?
Chris: It’s mostly newer stuff. This is one of a few tracks that we played off of our first record. When you hear a recording of any artist you like and you see them perform it live years later, it’s a new take. It’s the band in its current state playing a song they wrote in the past. It’s an interesting glimpse into how the song can take shape after it’s had that chance to evolve.
Ben: My favorite thing to get from an artist is a live DVD or a bunch of live videos, because that’s the best explanation of their sound you can possibly get. So when you search for Bent Knee, there are tons of videos that are actually good, that aren’t just iPhone videos from some bar we played before we knew how to play that song.
Gavin: We did a show in San Francisco on our second tour where our bass player at the time was still under 21 so we had to have our sound designer/synth guy sub on the bass. That entire show is on YouTube, so yeah, I think having [those videos and this one] is nice to have instead of a show with someone who doesn’t play bass in the band and bad clipping. Probably my single greatest influence is a Peter Gabriel live film. That’s the reason I’m a musician today. And the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense changed me musically. Watching live footage of bands can hit in me in many more ways than just hearing it.
Ben: The live video is super direct to who these people are, what they mean, what they look like, what they sound like, and when you see what someone looks like when they play music it gives you an in to where it’s coming from. The fact of the matter is, you could listen to our music and say “oh, it’s super emotional and super dark and it’s got a lot of crazy textures.” But when you see us play it live, you’ll also see us smiling and having fun while we’re doing it. It adds a certain level of credibility to the darkness because we’re not just mannequins of depression*, we have all our feelings. And the sadness that went into writing the music and writing the lyrics comes out as this great celebration. I think if you miss that catharsis of sharing the sadness by not being at the live show, then you’re only seeing a very distorted picture of what the music really means.
Gavin: And hearing the way the band play to an audience changes the way the band addresses the material. I think seeing everything in the live setting is fucking mindblowing.
*That’s a great, and from what I can find, original turn of phrase. I’m totally stealing that.