Photograph by Joshua Black Wilkins, courtesy of Beth Bombara
Caitlin Franz has a special relationship to the event space below Downtown’s Bridge Tap House & Wine Bar. She was married in the venue last fall, and has seen, firsthand, how it can be rearranged into a flexible, interesting, even beautiful room. After learning that her friend Beth Bombara was working on three music videos to support her 2013 EP, “Raise Your Flag,” Franz decided to organize “an audio/visual art experience” combining a one-night viewing of the videos, which will be done inside of specially constructed viewing pods by musician, craftsman and installation artist David Burnett.
The three songs—“Right My Wrongs,” “Long Dark Hallelujah,” and “Mountain Sun”—were committed to video by Nashville photographer Joshua Black Wilkins. He was aided on-set by St. Louis photographer Nate Burrell, who served as a location scout and all-around PA for the shoots. Both Bombara and her musical partner Kit Hamon were thrilled to be working with the pair, who offered them a rare chance to work on a project without stressing every detail.
“I’m the kind of musician who, ever since I’ve played music, has done everything for myself,” Bombara says. “Now I’m at the point where it’s time to hire professionals to do things for me. With this, I just showed up with a guitar. I didn’t have to think about everything else. That was awesome, to put the creative reins in someone else’s hands.”
“We trusted that we were working with the right people,” Hamon adds. “They understood the songs and how to make videos that were realistic [to produce], but still had an interesting approach. It was very different from doing everything yourself, which is how we’ve done it for a long time.”
They say that Burrell introduced them to Wilkins, whom they met while traveling to Nashville. Hamon jokes that he, Bombara and Wilkins sat down to chat over beers and “by the third round, we went from doing one video to three.” That approach jibed with Bombara’s own secret hope that they’d be able to eventually do a video for each song on the six-track “Raise Your Flag.” They got halfway through that quiet goal during an intensive, three-day stretch of work during October, a time that Hamon remembers as luckily having “really beautiful weather.”
Shot in a variety of urban environments around the City of St. Louis, Burrell and Wilkins crashed through a number of possible locations during the day prior, selecting spaces that Hamon says really delighted Wilkins.
“He was pumped when he got here,” Hamon says. “Every time we were at a new location, he was saying ‘Are you flipping kidding me?’”
Adds Bombara, “He was excited by the possibilities for shooting, saying that the architecture was so cool here that he wanted to bring some of his personal photography projects to shoot in St. Louis.”
While excited by the near-complete rough cuts—all put together by Wilkins’ collaborator, editor Kyle Jones, with the exception of "Mountain Sun" which was edited by Wilkins himself—both Bombara and Hamon remain a tad reserved about the final projects, but on only one level. After all, in two of the cases, it’s just the two of them that’re featured. (For the third track, they’re joined by bandmates Karl Eggers and JJ Hamon.) Bombara remembers that Wilkins referred to the process as creating “moving portraits,” which was calming, yet…
“I don’t know about Beth,” Hamon says, “but I’m still self-conscious about [being filmed]. It’s weird. Here’s this thing that I’m putting out. It’s on video. And I’m not sitting with someone having a conversation about it. As Joshua said, ‘This will go on the Internet, and you’ll feel just as if you’ve had your pants pulled down.’”
“There was a ‘Wow!’ moment,” Bombara offers. “But you also feel pretty naked. It’s a ‘moving portrait’ of you and it looks so cool. But am I really okay with this? I don’t know!”
Both, though, are excited by the possibilities of what the videos could mean. They’ve planned for 2014 to be a year in which the group travels more, and there’s nothing like video to help spread their sound quickly and efficiently, all over the U.S. and beyond. To further the initial pop of the releases, they’re planning on not uploading the videos to sharing sites immediately, hoping to land an online video release with a major music site. After that, they’ll be offering them through the usual outlets, like YouTube and Vimeo.
“Having a music video, for someone who’s never heard your music, or has never even heard of you, can be a powerful and positive thing,” Bombara says.
And the first night towards spreading their message comes at Bridge, on Saturday, January 25. The event will run from 8-11 p.m.; around 9 p.m., the band will play a truncated, 30-minute set. Because there’s no stage in the room, they’ll likely set up in an unusual way, either surrounding the audience, or playing in a tight square within it, each member facing different ways. That determination will likely be made in the day/two prior to the event, as Burnett will adding his touches (the three pods) just before the show.
Burnett, in fact, will have some of the trickiest duties. Working from sketches, he’ll bring lumber, paper and other construction materials into the space, building on-site on Friday. And because the subterranean Bridge event space houses a Christian congregation on Sunday mornings, the Vintage Ten Church, he’ll be tearing the whole thing down immediately post-event.
“That’s one of the things that’s most interesting,” Hamon says. “They don’t do a lot of events down there; her wedding was one of the first big things there, not related to the church. It’s not that the space is unutilized, but there haven’t been events like this on a regular basis. And Dave’s building these pods that will be constructed the day before and torn down before church services the next day.
“He’s got these viewing pods,” Hamon adds, “that are loose and asymmetrical frames. They’ll feel and look like buildings that have fallen down, with each within a domed structure. There’ll be translucent paper filling in the frames and from the outside, you’ll see shapes and color and lights, from the video. Inside, you’ll have a screen, a bench and individual headphones, four of them, for people to put on and listen to the songs. It should be really neat. And it should work very well for not having everyone sitting down and watching the same video on the same screen. It’ll be more of an art exhibit than a standard video release.”
Both Bombara and Hamon say that the night is a celebration of collaboration. The short-lived set construction by Burnett. The songwriting and performance of Bombara, Hamon, Hamon and Eggers. The video art of Wilkins, Burrell and Jones. And the initial idea and promotional push of Franz.
“I’m excited that Caitlin had this vision to bring together art along with the music,” says Bombara. “She’s done a really good job of making that happen, I think. It’s going to be so different that it’ll be awesome, or people will say, ‘What the hell is this?’”
The Beth Bombara and David Burnett Audio/Visual Art Experience happens Saturday, January 25, from 8 to 11 p.m. at Bridge Tap House & Wine Bar (1004 Locust, 314-241-8141, thebridgestl.com). The event is free; more info on the Facebook event page.
