There was a time in New York City when beauty was considered a perfectly legitimate reason to make an absolute spectacle of yourself. The downtown avant-garde of the late 1970s and early ’80s understood the exquisite absurdity of existence, and answered it with painted faces, impossible clothes, experimental films, and people who looked as though they had escaped from an opera staged inside Salvador Dalí’s subconscious. Klaus Nomi sang arias dressed as an extraterrestrial Bauhaus school escapee. The Factory crowd treated ordinary life as an endless screen test. Leigh Bowery eventually carried this philosophy into even more outrageous territory. Beauty for beauty’s sake was practically a civic duty, and good taste was frequently its first casualty.
Synth-pop project Primitive Heart, the creation of multi-disciplinary artist Dani Mari, belongs to that grand tradition of making something beautiful simply because the alternative seems terribly dull.
Primitive Heart’s music shares that fascination with exquisite artificiality. Mari’s airy, expressive singing floats above economical electronic arrangements, where the romantic cool of Chromatics, the dreamy distance of Still Corners, and the darker elegance of Drab Majesty find agreeable company. On “Steady (Vile Remix),” Vile brings her electronic sensibilities into Mari’s peculiar universe, providing a musical companion to the video’s wonderfully eccentric parade of fashionable absurdity.
The video for Steady (Vile Remix), co-directed by frequent collaborators Alice Teeple and Matthew Deegan, offers a deliciously demented excursion into a private universe where three magnificently dressed eccentrics appear to have misplaced their invitation to reality.
Mari, Deegan, and New York-based artist Vile lounge around eating grapes, drinking bubbly in a bathtub, dancing, and generally conducting themselves with the splendid self-importance of aristocrats who have inherited a fortune and absolutely no responsibilities. The costumes, styled by Deegan, borrow from the extravagant theatricality of queer performance, high fashion, and the gloriously peculiar corners of twentieth-century cinema. Warhol’s early short films spring immediately to mind, especially their fascination with beautiful people doing wonderfully inconsequential things.
As for the video, Andy Warhol would probably have watched the entire affair from a sofa, said something marvelously unhelpful, and helped himself to another grape.
“I’ve always been fascinated by figures like Leigh Bowery and Klaus Nomi, Bob Fosse dancers, and vintage fashion shoots from the 1950s and ’60s with their impossibly aloof models,” says Teeple. “Fashion, to me, is at its most exciting when it’s pushed toward the bizarre and taken somewhere beyond our expectations. We wanted to channel that spirit through a series of avant-garde vignettes featuring three eccentric figures who seem to exist inside their own surreal bubble. In a world of oversaturation, overstimulation, and oversharing, there’s something far more intriguing about leaving behind a beautiful mystery.”
Primitive Heart’s sophomore album, Colours, co-produced by Rosana Cabán (Psychic Twin, Cosas Cosas), features remixes from Jorja Chalmers (Italians Do It Better) and Chasms (Felte). Out via GrindEthos, the record continues Mari’s fascination with the strange romance of electronic music.
Watch the video for Steady (Vile Remix) below:
Listen to Colours below and pre-order the album here.
Follow Primitive Heart:
The post NYC Synthpop Artist Primitive Heart Serves Grapes, Glamour, and Downtown Decadence in Video for “Steady (Vile Remix)” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
