behind the video with Ziemba ("We Implode")
I get so excited about new music from Ziemba that I feel like the artist name should be spelled and said with an exclamation point: Ziemba! I've been a fan of René Kladzyk's musical project since interviewing her for The Alternative—that chat was about the inspiration behind her effusive last album, True Romantic, and all the little details that made it so special—and now she's putting out her first record in six years, The Braid, out 10/2.
olvidor
Kladzyk grounds grandiose visions in tight songwriting. "Indie pop" does not do it justice as a genre tag. Every song of hers is a mini-universe, a short film, a warmly-lit tableau...god I love the word tableau, but I really want it to be plural, hmm...all her songs are warmly-lit tableaux. "We Implode" is a perfect example of Ziemba worldbuilding. It's a snappy power pop song about the delusion required to make ill-fated love last a little longer; the song stretches out at intervals so we can luxuriate in some unusually beautiful strings, its sense of time contracting and expanding throughout...which all makes sense when you realize the song was written over the course of a decade, and the perspective about the relationship actually shifts over the course of the song. Neat!
"We Implode" also has a wonderful music video, with Kladzyk cavorting both elegantly and goofily amid a chandelier store and dry cleaning facility in the greater Los Angeles area, wearing a striking outfit (with a great backstory you will read about shortly). As soon as I saw the video, I knew I needed to hear about its making, so I emailed Kladzyk some Qs. Below....the As to those Qs...
[Molly Mary O'Brien] First let's talk about video locations! You got some stellar ones. How did you land on these places?
[Kladzyk] We found and secured these filming locations through a combination of luck and extreme broke-ness. The whole video had a shoestring budget and we were not in a position to pay for much of anything. But these spots somehow magically appeared: I was having breakfast at Foxy’s Diner in Glendale and noticed a chandelier store next door where the floor was covered in wooden crates. I immediately thought, "I want to make a music video in there," but was nervous to ask right off the bat. So I went in, chatted with the owner briefly and got his card. A couple weeks later I called him and asked for permission to do a very quick photoshoot in the store. He said yes, and a friend and I shot some album promo pics, we were probably in there for about 20 minutes. The owner was so gracious and seemed entirely unbothered by our presence that when I started scheming a music video for "We Implode" along with co-directors Liz Charky and Laura Bartczak, it seemed obvious that we should ask again to shoot in the store. After we had filmed in the store for about a half day, I did try to offer the owner a little cash, to which he replied, “if you’re happy, I’m happy,” and refused the money. An ANGEL.
I think what I latched onto in the chandelier store was the specific combination of the fantastical and mundane; like, in the backroom there were literally mountains of boxes of chandelier parts, and little shattered pieces of lightbulbs on the floor (which made dancing barefoot treacherous). To me that combination seemed appropriate for the thematic content of the song, and I think guided how we approached finding other locations. It wasn’t really a specific story we were chasing, just vibes.
Other locations were chosen knowing that we were shooting in the chandelier store: we wanted the video to have a sense of journey to it, and since we were doing a long one day shoot, we also knew we’d be shooting in both daylight and night. We scouted a dry cleaners in my neighborhood, and the owner was a jewel. On the day of the shoot when he was getting ready to close, he just handed over the keys to the shop and told us to lock up when we were done and bring the keys back in the morning. Liz Charkey scouted the exterior architecture at Barnsdall Art Park in L.A. and thought it had a lot of transitional spaces that could work for us, and that we could probably get away with shooting surreptitiously there. At one point a security guard did stop us, but he mostly wanted to tell us about his time doing covert ops in Nicaragua in the CIA. He told us he was also an artist and liked to see the kids making art, and then left us to our own devices.
I very much enjoyed your dancing. There were parts that were more beautiful and elegant, and then parts where I was cracking up. Laura Bartczak was also your choreographer—what is it like to figure out how to do this kind of movement in a video?
Laura and I have been friends for a long time, and I think the feeling of safety and comfort that comes with that made a huge difference in how we approached choreography. I love music videos that are centered on a single person dancing, but was also a little intimidated at the thought – I’ve made one other music video that was very dance-centric, but I cast someone else to star in it.
Our process was pretty straight-forward though, we talked about choreographic ideas and I put together a list of references: the ending dance freakout in Beau Travail, Christopher Walken in the Fatboy Slim music video, Les Rita Mitsouko (literally always a reference for every music video I make), the choreographers Michael Clark, Pina Bausch, and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Laura reviewed the references and started coming up with a sort of repository of movement ideas, which we then worked through, tweaked, and refined together. She and I both have a lot of comfort with improvisation, and baked opportunities for improvisation and mischief into the movement plans so that we could be more free on the shoot day. Even though the movement ended up shifting a bit in the final edited video, what we choreographed is a fairly complete dance throughout the song that can be performed start to finish, which was extremely fun and satisfying to make.
In general, I like to make sure there’s at least a little dose of silly in anything I make, and I think I’m pretty drawn to work that straddles that line you’re talking about, the border between elegance and cracking up. On the day we shot I was also pushing myself to the brink of exhaustion, which I think is visible at a number of parts in the vid: we shot for 12 hours on a hot day in July, with me in a wool coat and dancing for pretty much that entire time. I think that baked some different extremes into the video.
Related to the dancing is that your outfit works so well with the motion. Please walk me through how you put this 'fit together.
I’m going to sound like such a crazy person but here goes: for half the year I generally like my personal style to evoke vampire, normally in the fall and winter, and then in spring and summer I shift to fairie as my overarching style reference. But with this video (and with pretty much all the album imagery for my forthcoming record) I have been firmly situated in vampire aesthetics. When I say vampire that normally (but not exclusively) means the vampires in the 1983 film The Hunger starring Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie.
I love that period of '80s tailoring when it's hugely referential of the 1940s but gets slightly more surreal and dramatic in the silhouettes. When I was trying to figure out what to wear for this video I knew I wanted something that felt harsh and mysterious and like I might be a villain, and latched onto the idea of wearing a really tailored coat. I was also looking at a lot of the dance references I mentioned before, and felt like I was really drawn to more typically masculine shapes and styling. But I also wanted to be a bit feral and able to move easily, and in general like to live my life barefoot as often as possible. The coat I ended up with is a fun piece of fashion history and was the result of a lot of eBay lurking: it's a Gianni Versace design from when he was designing for the Italian brand "Genny" in the 80s, before Versace popped off as we know it.
It feels really interesting to not have the lip syncing until the end. What made you go that route?
The honest answer is that it just felt right on some instinctive level. There wasn’t a lot of concrete logic to it. When Laura and I started working on the choreography, I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to lip sync, and wanted to focus on dancing. But this song has a whole journey in the lyrics, and the last line "I was happy" feels revelatory to me, so it felt good to only lip sync that one line.
2nd bonus—what are your favorite music videos of all time?
Les Rita Mitsouko’s Marcia Baila music video is for sure up toward the top of the list. I love everything about this video: the humor, the drama, the colors, the energy, it's such a world! It's a world I want to live in.
Perfume Genius has a lot of incredible music videos with unbelievable art direction, though I think Queen is my favorite. I once interviewed the director of the video and he told me it was loosely based on Forrest Gump, which is an extremely fun additional layer to view it through.
There’s a Raffaella Carra video for her cover of Night and Day that has been influential for me in a lot of regards.
But then there are just so so many greats, like how could you pick a favorite Björk video? I also really love a lot of Annie Lennox’s solo music videos, she has one of the most expressive faces in the history of humans. Andrew Thomas Huang’s music videos are incredible across the board, I remember first being really astonished by his work with the FKA Twigs video for Cellophane.
I’m going to stop there but the long and short of it is that there are so many fantastic and inspiring music videos and my answer to this question changes day to day.
Thank you René! The new Ziemba album is called The Braid and it comes out October 2nd, you can pre-order it on Bandcamp here.
