Weirdwolf

The Winter ’09 issue of Fretboard Journal has a terrific interview between Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and guitarist Michael Chapman. For the past few years I’ve been producing a short documentary called Fully Qualified Survivor about Michael Chapman’s music and his life on Wrytree Farm with his wife Andru. Michael will be coming to the US to perform at the Jack Rose Memorial Concert in Philadelphia February 13th and playing some additional dates on the East Coast.

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Here’s the latest episode of VBS‘s Soft Focus series shot at ATP music festival featuring King Buzzo of the Melvins. I was editor for all eight episodes of the Soft Focus: UK series two years ago so when VBS’s in house editor left for tour they called me in to lend a hand finishing up the ATP edits. The Buzz interview needed to be edited down by at least half so tons of fantastic material didn’t make the cut. Such as Buzz talking about learning to play guitar at 18, growing up in an isolated hellhole, his loathing of opera music & composers (posers), his love of John Huston’s work ethic and films, his graphic designer wife, as well as lots of other little goodies. But this final cut will not disappoint.

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This is the last post in the VBS series of Neurosis at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. I’m psyched that VBS aired these songs uncut. Neurosis alone played for about and hour plus we shot another hour of Mastodon. Can’t wait for that footage to hit VBS because its heavy. Thanks to all the other shooters and Brendan Fitzgerald and Logan Leichtman at VBS for making this such an awesome project to work on. Hopefully there will be more to come…

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Neurosis and Mastodon at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple was an intense event to shoot. After the Neurosis part of the show myself and one of the other shooters snuck up the back staircase of the Masonic Temple in search of the “coffin room”. After many flights up we finally came upon a coffin standing upright in the hallway. The room was an abyss of black so we used our camera flash to scope the site. Inside the immense room was a few throne looking chairs on some kind of stage. Looked like the setting for Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. Nice…

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For the Neurosis and Mastodon show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple we gathered an excellent group of shooters to capture the event for VBS. Included were VBS regular Dan Cain, VBS staffers Brendan Fitzgerald & Dana Lavoie, graphic designer and documentarian Seldon Hunt, myself and an uncredited avant garde filmmaker and documentarian whose style you may recognize… Scott Kelly was apprehensive about having one of the shooters onstage but he told me in his heavy ruminating tone “you’ll know what to do”… yeah…

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Vice Magazine/VBS put together this now legendary show with Neurosis and Mastodon at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. While shooting front and center between Steve Von Till and Scott Kelly I was completely crushed by the crowd. When I asked Scott Kelly beforehand if he would mind me shooting directly underneath him he told me to watch out and hold my own. I did my best haha…

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Neurosis and Mastodon played at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple January 25th, 2008. VBS was kind enough to ask me to direct, co-shoot and edit this six camera shoot. Neurosis was phenomenal and we had an exceptional crew of shooters. Luckily Josh Graham, the visual artist aspect of Neurosis, asked the lighting guy for extra stage lights since the show was pitch black the night prior. Those onstage blue lights made all the difference…

(Update: VBS originally aired this in separate part but it now airs as one long show. I have added the new version to these posts.)

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This is last episode of Billy Childish Soft Focus UK. Billy talks with Ian Svenonius about his interest in history, Vincent Van Gogh, Jesus Christ and peoples lack of understanding nature. There was so much good exposition that we had to cut from this series just for time, gorilla book covers, TV and automobiles ruining modern day life, The British Invasion, The Velvet Revolution, Brian Wilson, Mudhoney, making films, the Industrial Revolution and star science… It was a fantastic interview to edit…

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In part four of Billy Childish Soft Focus UK, Billy talks about ridding our society of professionals. Editing these discussions between Ian Svenonius and Billy Childish was a pure pleasure. The two completely connected and what I heard was that after the two hour interview they went off to continue their conversation about politics, music and art for another two hours. My favorite part of this interview is Billy talking about how different the intention is between himself and The White Stripes.

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In this episode of Soft Focus UK Billy Childish talks about originality and influences.

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