Alexander Geist and Ben Jackson premiere their ‘Far Worse’ music video via AQNB today, January 12. The self-released collaboration presents its gabber, donk and pop-inspired production alongside video artist Fritz Schiffers‘ lo-fi application to footage of Folsom Europe‘s leather and BDSM event.
Berlin-based artist and producer Jackson — who also took part in CAVE3000 and M.I/mi1glissé’s Times New Romantic exhibition last year — takes singer Geist’s usually glam rock vocal and pitches it in a way that echoes the queer manipulations of Planningtorock‘s 2011 album W. Exploring notions of “connection, class, (loss of) control, and (lack of) restraint,” the video features cuts, frames and edits of leather-bound figures playing out to the hardcore beats with less the ecstatic intensity of drug culture and more the covert swagger of the fetish scene. Moody night vision sequences and baroque production blend with Geist’s lyrics of raw and consuming heartbreak: “you said don’t spoilt the carpet.” Inspired by Dangerous Liaisons and Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the words feature these highbrow sources alongside the considered lowbrow realm of gabber music.
“It began as something about love and heartbreak, things we’ve both been living through,” writes Jackson about the motivation behind ‘Far Worse.’ “It’s texturally and emotionally brittle. But it came to also involve for us class identity and genres like gabber and donk — how genre relates to class. It’s considered poor taste to abandon all restraint. So we were pursuing something extreme, heartfelt, and ‘tasteless’.”
As part of Geist’s continued conceptual investigation of disseminating music in the digital era, it will be released as a telephone call here: alexandergeist.com.**
