Parquet Courts | Black Widow Spider Claymation Video

posted by Emily Gosling October 8, 2021

Like many bands, New York-based post punk outfit Parquet Courts has long straddled both the visual art world and the music scene.

The band began life in 2010, with frontman Andrew Savage having met guitarist/keyboard player Austin Brown while both students at the University of North Texas. It was there that he studied painting, honing the skills he would go on to use to create all his band’s artwork. Savage maintains a significant painting practice outside of his work with the band from a studio in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.

When you look back through Parquet Courts’ records, there’s an obvious visual lineage that plays out through the various releases: they each create their own miniature worlds, but also form part of a cohesive whole. It could be assumed this is partly down to Savage’s own synaesthesia, meaning he “hears” colour and “sees” sound.

Speaking to It’s Nice That in 2018, Savage has said that rather than using existing artwork for record sleeve designs (he creates everything including the concept and layout himself) he sees the work he does for the band as separate to his own practice.

He said that he wanted to create a unique “visual lexicon” that translates Parquet Courts’ sound. “Historically, there’s a colour that I identify with the sounds on the record,” he told the site. “The new one is an almost yellow heavy shade of red, and then a very strong green. The way they interact with each other is something that I feel from listening to the music. I was listening to the record non-stop while working on the artwork for it.”

The band’s visually driven approach to its music also extends to its videos, which are equally thoughtful and distinct, despite being commissioned out. Take its most recent release, for instance: the video for Black Widow Spider is a psychedelic Claymation extravaganza inspired by 1950s-born American stop motion series Gumby.

The track itself, from Parquet Courts’ forthcoming new album Sympathy for Life looked to sound “equal parts Can, Canned Heat and This Heat,” Savage has said.

The video was directed by Shayne Ehman of video production house Cricket Cave, which is based in Thunder Bay, Canada. Working as a director, artist, animator and musician, Ehman says his artwork explores themes of “empathy and consciousness, visualization for healing, and deep spark semantics”. Shayne is co- director of the animated feature film Asphalt Watches which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013 where it received a Fipresci Prize for Best First Canadian Feature Film.

“We were inspired by the claymation master Art Clokey,” says Ehman of his new work for Parquet Courts. “I wanted the video to feel like it was shot in the 1950’s and so I used very old lenses. One was a brass projection lens from the 1860’s and another was radioactive.”