Tim Kuhl, “Drive” from 1982 (2015): Something Else! sneak peek video

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Back in late June, Tim Kuhl issued a new album 1982 that he managed to put together during gaps of time amid his involvement with the Invisible Familiars and Sean Lennon’s Ghost Of a Saber Tooth Tiger. An upcoming video from a 1982 scheduled for its own release on July 20, 2015 helps to deepen the understanding of the complex meaning behind Kuhl’s deceptively straightforward music.

“Drive” is constructed upon a simple, repeating, pulsing bass figure accompanied by the spoken words of the poet Geoffrey Bankowski and an acerbic metal guitar by Ryan Mackstaller that randomly crashes into the song’s uneasy tranquility. On the Lee Gingold-directed video, previewed above, we witness a female dancer (Anna Copa Cabanna) who at the start of her performance is smiling but quickly shows sign of frustration, confusion and ultimately, withdrawal.

The building anxiety is playing out the words of Bankowski, who begins his recital with, “It was the noise, the individual sounds thrown by the city, that had entered, had accumulated in her. She could feel them spin and hit and call against the dark inside, against the bones and soft tissue. Hundreds of thousands of them, unwanted…angry traffic spit and scrape of metals…” Cabanna’s half-mime, half-dance brings the dark prose to life.

The video completes the whole presentation for “Drive,” which is musical art, poetry, and, as it turns out, visual art — all rolled into one.

S. Victor Aaron