Here’s a music video treat: Canadian legend Joel Gibb aka The Hidden Cameras joins up with Berlin’s Local Suicide and music video dream team. It’s a murky trip into the queer party underworld with a lone dancer searching for the unanswerable. Plus we get a look inside the studio for some of the vintage synths producing those EBM sounds.
The video for club anthem “Homme Fatal” has flown under the radar these months, but it’s well deserving of a CDM Premiere. The project is the work of Lebanese cinematographer Zaher Jureidini and Czech director Ondřej Teplý, starring actor and opera singer Bagdasar Khachikyan in the moody lead role.
Jureidini and Teplý perfectly capture the mood of that party, too – managing to make it dark and grimy, like you can smell the cigarette ash and BO, feel that sense of wandering around and slight paranoia and release on the dance floor and … well, that blinding sunlight. Uh, I’ve heard from a friend, probably, about all that. It’s also maybe the darkest of the dark disco on the album, irresistibly stripped down and alluringly cold. And yet ther’s still plenty of wit and irony – “Sekt auf Eis” / “Eidelweiss” calls for a soft lol. The site is Berlin’s Urban Spree, the venue doomed by scheduled construction and an iconic destination for EBM fans (plus the Detroit Underground showcase we hosted earlier this year).
Photo: Jany Zindel.
There’s been nothing but goodness coming out of Local Suicide’s album Eros Anikate and the subsequent remix albums (including Italian dance giant Franz Scala taking on the remix of this cut). At a time when finely crafted productions too often fail to deliver gigs, here Local Suicide are bucking the trend – Max and Dina have been globe-trotting in the wake of this one, and well deserved.
But even in the rest of that lineup (check the album below), “Homme Fatal” is a stand-out, and the cinematography here perfectly catches the mood. It’s a collab with Joel Gibb who goes by The Hidden Cameras – now on tour with another great Canadian musical mind, musician and composer Owen Pallett. Gibb has been a powerful for voice many years, a provocateur celebrating queer equality. He can do so in what can be a beautifully unassuming deadpan, a mild-mannered honesty. And that winds up being a perfect match for Local Suicide’s joyful and unpresumptuous club sounds.
A taste of some of Gibb’s past work, with a message that seems as urgent as ever (the image of school teasing might just give you chills):
I did promise a studio tour, and Local Suicide and friends have been … collecting, it seems. So, as advertised, here’s a peek inside the the studio shared by Max from Local Suicide with two other great artists, T.Raumschmiere (hence the s***katapult logo!) and Italo Brutalo:
And here you go, have a Local Suicide DJ set:
We premiered a video once before from this album last year, and – I still love this cut. Erm, so to speak.
More at https://iptamenosdiscos.com: