SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM: 'Helpless Corpses Enactment' Video Posted Online

May 22, 2007

San Francisco act SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM has posted the video for its song "Helpless Corpses Enactment" online at YouTube. The track comes off the group's forthcoming album, "In Glorious Times", due on May 29 via The End Records. The clip was helmed by acclaimed New York director Adam Feinstein (HOODWINK, SAY YOU LOVE ME),whose recent honors include a 2006 Emmy nomination, an Independent Spirit award, and prizes at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Los Angeles Film Festival. His work is marked by its electricity, drama, and sheer visual intensity.

About the video, which was shot on location in Oakland, California and the Pacific coast, Feinstein comments, "I've been fascinated with SGM since I first heard them five years ago. I found their music inscrutable, beautiful, and profoundly original. I'm also a former concert player (violin),and I was bowled over by their level of technique. When we started to talk about a music video, I didn't know what song I'd be asked to work on. But from SLEEPYTIME I knew to expect music that had invented its own rules, music that would challenge a video to keep up with it. 'Corpses' didn't disappoint! None of us wanted anything like a concert film — didn't want to see mic stands, guitars, drums. Nobody really even liked the term 'music video.' We didn't want to simulate what you could see at a live show. I wanted to use the opportunity to tap the peculiar power of SLEEPYTIME's music — to conjure up images as strange and direct as those in dreams."

"We the SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM, having stoicly pledged from our inception to hand-warm the hearts and minds of the rockus populus, have carved from our souls a lock of merchant ivory fabric, and gleefully transformed this fiber into a watchable and knowable lump of... moving song," says the band of the video. "Videos are often amazing... Look at 'Dr. Feelgood' by MÖTLEY CRÜE, or 'All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You' by HEART. In making our own music film, we've taken masterpieces of hot-blooded emotion like these and completely ignored them, perhaps alienating most of the world, but ultimately allowing us to claim allegiance to the bloodline of the great filmists of the 20th century."

About work on the video shoot, the band states: "The weather was beautiful. People came out of the woodwork to help. 5 a.m. calls, fantastic food made by Dan's wife, Nieves. Nils dying of hypothermia in the chilled January Pacific ocean. Beguiling women washing their garments in the waves. Adam Feinstein pacing the dunes with his iPod. Camera dollies on the piney underbed. Befriending park rangers, smelling orchids, stabbing pigs. And, of course, watching the final project with a glowing familial surge in our loins."

In other news, the band is following up their successful sold-out North American spring tour with SECRET CHIEFS 3, as well their first ever headlining tour of Europe, with another tour starting at the end of May.

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