Music Makers

behind the music video with Activity ("Heavy Breathing")

Do you know about the band Activity? Man, you should. The Brooklyn four-piece—Travis Johnson (vocals / multi-instrumentalist), Bri DiGioia (bass/vocals), Jess Rees (guitar/vocals/keys), and Brian Alvarez (drums)—have been putting out thoughtful, powerfully aura'd experimental rock since their debut album Unmask Whoever dropped a month into the Covid-19 pandemic.

Their third release, A Thousand Years In Another Way, came out this past June on Western Vinyl and the vibe is eerie and obscure but also purposeful and focused...like that feeling of an airplane taking off and going through thick-ass clouds and it feels like you're stuck in a cloud vortex forever, but the forward momentum breaks you through eventually..and you're still trapped in the air but at least there's a little light and some room to breathe...you feel me?

I saw Johnson, who I last interviewed for The Alternative about custom-making a guitar pedal (he has an effects pedal company called Trap Door Electronics) post about the process of making a video for one of the A Thousand Years In Another Way singles, "Heavy Breathing," and my Behind The Video buzzer buzzed. The "Heavy Breathing" video is cool as hell. Stop motion and slow motion shots enhance the temporal vibes of the song, which is both kinda fast (drums, bass) and kinda slow (atmospheric synthesizers).

[Molly Mary O'Brien] First, I saw the video posted with the caption that said it took 10,000 photos and a month to pull it off. I would love to hear about the full production process from start to finish! Get as in-depth as ya want.

[Travis Johnson] We asked our friend Yasmeen Night if she wanted to help, and really to come up with something, because she has cameras and ideas and most of the time we don't have either of those. I think one of her favorite videos of all time is the Peter Gabriel "Sledgehammer" video so that was her jumping off point.

It was a super elaborate setup, or series of setups, that she had. A lot of them were me lying on my back with a camera pointed down at me, taking photos every few seconds while she slowly wrapped or unwrapped a rope around my face and neck in tiny little increments. I now have a cool rope burn scar on my collarbone because I couldn't move once we started it. We did the same type of things with Jess and me getting wrapped together while Yasmeen and Bri moved the ropes and inch or two at a time. We'd do that for like two hours and then be like "cool, we got 18 seconds of footage!"

Then there were the shots with Bri, running. I had to drive backwards with the camera facing forward at her, mounted on the hood, and I’m just looking behind the car the whole time, hoping she was doing okay in front. At night.

Last, there were a few thousand photos of Manhattan and the East River, taken over the course of several hours, that were sped up and superimposed behind me lip synching. Yasmeen laid this all out really well and had a real idea for what it was going to look like, and I had none, so the credit all goes to her!

What inspired the composition of the photos, color palette, etc.? How do you feel the visuals connect with the song?

I know the color of the ropes was really important because at first they were going to be these bioluminescent creatures, but we kind of couldn't pull that off completely. There was at first more of a “plot” to the video that I guess got a little abandoned. And I think it all just came from what the song did in Yasmeen’s head when she heard it. For me, it works, because it’s a really bright song, and all the neon rope snaking around everything feels like that to me.

This is a distinctly NYC video! You guys are a New York band, how do you feel about New York as a part of your band identity?

In a way I like it, being a New York band, I guess because of the history of music that comes from here. All the jazz, house, the no wave noisy stuff. All those things that we’re thinking of when we’re making our stuff. But I maybe kind of hate it too, because it’s such an absurdly expensive city with so many absolutely hideous new buildings that it’s almost embarrassing to be from here. I guess that’s also every American city now to an extent though.

Did anything surprise you or challenge you about doing a stop-motion shoot?

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but I was amazed at how long it would take. It would look so cool to watch back what we’d just spent hours making, but then it’s just over in seconds, and you realize how much more you’ve got to shoot. But it’s worth it. Thank goodness Yasmeen was down to make it, and had the patience and skill.

Finally, do you have a favorite music video? Or favorites, if you can't pick one.

An all time favorite would be “Blue Jay Way” which I only recently discovered had a video.

I love the video for “Dum Surfer” by King Krule. I like how it’s shot and it’s really funny to me. Actually both of those are funny and creepy at the same time.

I’m a sucker for videos from the film era even if I don’t love the song, like “Say It Ain’t So” or “So Real” by Jeff Buckley, where you can just see how wonderful the film is. “It Ain’t Hard to Tell” by Nas, though, I love that song.

But yeah our generation never got to make stuff on film unless we had big budgets. I guess that ended with Gen X music.

And then the really ridiculous insane stuff from when videos were still a newish thing, like “Ashes to Ashes” where you can tell they’re just throwing every bonkers trick at it at once.