Back Country

There was something crystalline about the sounds Bruce Arnold was getting out of his guitar for this one, and we were reminded of snowfall in the country, so we called this one “Back Country.” Coincidentally, the day I started to put this together, it started to snow, so I went for a walk, camcorder in hand. The flurry of snowflakes were a terrific visual match to the sounds of the guitar, and the vocal effects also seemed to re-enforce the sense of a remote and windswept place. I put some cool filters on the footage, so that in some places the outlines of roots and branches gives the video an almost “Japanese woodblock” feel. The snowflakes themselves also offered a sense of density and distortion. Against this background, the shadowy, translucent figures of the Judi and Bruce drift in and out, sometimes single, sometimes doubled, echoing their own musical and physical gestures.