Playlist: Zach Tavel

What’s the best music video you’ve seen recently and why?

At this point it's three years old, but I still feel like not enough people have seen Keith Schofield's video for Duck Sauce - Mesmerize, which I firmly believe is the video of the 2020s.

More recently though, I love the video Weyes Blood - Twin Flame, directed by Ambar Navarro, so much. I can't get over how painstakingly far they went to evoke that mid-century horror feel.

The Hives - Bogus Operandi, directed by Aube Perrie, also just goes so unreasonably hard. It's basically a perfect music video.

What’s the first music video you remember being impressed by?

I was obsessed with music videos from a super early age, but I don’t think I considered that there was like, a crew, and especially not a director. I just thought the artists made them. They mostly served as my guide for what was cool and therefore how to dress and act. I made some questionable style choices. We don’t need to discuss. 

It wasn’t until I was in college, seeing the video for El Guincho - Bombay, directed by CANADA, quite a few years after it came out, where I had this moment of, ah yes music videos, people make these. It made me go back and think about all of the videos I loved as a kid and about the authorship of those behind the camera. 

And what’s your all-time favourite music video?

There’s a video from 1964 of steel guitar/talkbox legend Pete Drake - Forever (banger) in this strangely dreamlike prairie house set that feels plucked from an uncanny nightmare vision of mid-century rural America. I think about it basically every day. I get something out of it every time I watch it.

What other directors/artists do you look to for inspiration?

I feel like I look less to other directors and artists for inspiration as much as I look towards the strange happenings and images all around us. Why does this 30 foot wide billboard for rhinoplasty at the Denver Airport make me feel this way? How can I encapsulate that feeling in a video project? That sort of thing. 

At the same time, I’m always inspired by certain types of films as vehicles to channel those ideas, even if that’s not via specific directors. Specifically, I look towards less celebrated, lower-budget films from the 1940s through the 1980s. Educational films, TV specials, film noir, folk horrors, spoofs, golden age dance films, technicolor melodramas, erotic vampire movies, b-tier westerns, beer commercials, you name it. 

Though above all, there’s a bonkers independently produced religious film from 1977 called The Believer's Heaven that I watch every time I start a project. It makes any David Lynch movie feel like a taut realist drama by comparison. You have to watch the whole thing to really get it.

What are you listening to at the moment?

I found a compilation of Turkish psychedelic folk music called Turkish Freakout 2 recently and I just can’t get enough. I don’t really understand what makes it psychedelic, but it’s basically the only music I’ve listened to for the last seven weeks. I really just need to get Turkish Freakout 1, but I can’t find a copy for less than $100. I’ve been delusionally acting like the market for Turkish Freakout 1 is volatile enough that the price will go down, so I should just buy it.

What’s your favorite bit of tech, whether for professional or personal use?

I’m a heavy user of the hilarious pre-visualization iPad app called PreVis Pro. I can’t really use it when I’m boarding for professional purposes (I use a slightly less ghoulish, more robust 3D previz program for that), but as a fun tool it is unbeatable. 

It basically lets you create deranged 3D versions of your productions. You can “build” “sets” in there, emulate lens choices, block shots, etc. but the limitations are truly perplexing considering how powerful it has the potential to be. I won’t belabor the point, but if this sounds at all intriguing, I recommend that all filmmakers try it out. Especially if the idea of storyboarding in a program that’s basically Robolox if it was made in haste in the middle of a feverish fugue state sounds appealing to you. 

What artist(s) would you most like to work with and why?

I always think about Pitbull here. The idea of taking an artist who’s got such an established world and visual language and infusing it with a totally different sensibility would be a thrill. Pitbull has basically nothing to lose at this point. He’s a legend. People love him, he’s got a great sense of humour. I have a lot of ideas already, but I don’t expect my phone to be ringing about this anytime soon.

How do you feel the promo industry has changed since you started in it?

To my delight, it’s been a while since I’ve needed to convince any artist or label to let us shoot on film. In fact, a lot of artists have come to me specifically with that hope of shooting on film. As cliche as it may sound, I think the desire for a sense of realness in the digital world feels more present than ever.

Where do you see the music video industry being in five years’ time? 

As an example, I’ve been loving seeing what artists like Paris Texas are doing with their videos. Everything they do feels like it exists in their own world, but all of their videos feel so relevant to today's tastes.  I think they have different directors working on all of them, but they all share a sensibility and work so brilliantly as a series.

With this in mind, I can definitely see more artists and their teams tripling down on this type of cohesive world-building with their videos. If I was 14 right now these videos would probably make me dedicate my entire personality to them because they feel like such a universe. 

Similarly, I think the TikTok-ification of Spotify is inevitable, with features for users to swipe up and down on songs via vertical music videos, until they find one to latch onto and watch in full. So I can see a scenario where videos will return to an era of high-concept, hook-y, funny visual ideas in due time in order to excite audiences who are swiping for hours on end.