Artist : Zhenya Kolykhanov
Song : отец (Father)
Director: Raymond J. Schlogel
Production Company : Underground Planet

This one was somewhat spontaneous. I actually first met Zhenya about two months ago at a club where he was playing with his band Zeerok & The Immigrants. A band which on their MySpace page describe themselves as "Rockabilly, Jump Swing". The band was pretty incredible and something about a Russian guy doing Rockabilly in Austin Texas was just to cool.

About a week later he invited me out to see him do his solo thing at a little upscale chocolate shoppe called Viva Chocolato! In stark contrast to what I had seen just days before, here he played a variety of string instruments while running them and his voice through a loop machine. I'd seen some pretty amazing solo stuff using a loop machine before but till then it had always been hip hop/rap performers. Essentially an artist will record bits of music or a beat by tapping on on control board with their foot and then trigger their playback which "loops" that bit of recorded sound. He would play and record a bit on a banjo, have that looping, put down the banjo, pick up a guitar, add a little bit, put down the guitar, move over the bass, add the bass line, all while singing whatever song he happened to be playing at the time. It was amazing to watch. I was especially impressed by this song because despite using all this modern gadgetry the song itself was traditional, classic and to see it created live was fascinating.

Fast forward a couple days and Zee came over to talk about the vid were going to do for Zeerok & The Immigrants. I told him that on a side note I'd really like to do something to show his solo stuff. As luck would have it he had all his equipment in his van outside. I stapled a couple black blankets to the wall, threw up a couple lights, he set up, plugged in and played. As noted at the beginning of the video the audio was done in one take, just as he performs it live, we just ran an XLR from his Boss RC-20 Loop Station to the camera. He replayed it a handful of times so I could get additional angles and then in post I used black and white and split screen to denote the parts that were being looped.

myspace.com/zeerok