The first line of Josh Evert’s “The Sound Of Machines” is literally about being woken up by construction equipment. “Milwaukeeans can relate,” says Evert. “Then I realized I have no idea what this equipment—or the people wielding it—could possibly be doing.”
For Evert, it serves as a metaphor for the larger machine and the difficulties of “raging against it” without really understanding it. “It seems impossible without money, but, of course, it isn’t,” says Evert. “The song is riding the fence—helplessness on one side, pragmatism on the other.”
“The Sound Of Machines” is part of Photogenic Memory (Kribber Krown), a project assembled from songs and fragments accumulated over more than a decade. The frontman for genre-bending indie rock mainstays the Fatty Acids, Evert has been a fan of manipulating sound as raw material in his solo work since 2018’s Braided River, which sampled dead tree branches collected in Denali National Park & Preserve. For the follow-up, he transformed field recordings from Great Smoky Mountains National Park into what would become 2022’s 7 Islands. On his third and latest solo LP, glitch-driven rhythms, post-rock and more standard compositional snippets collide as Evert considers how memory messes with a malleable past.
“The Sound Of Machines” gets an appropriately fractured visual treatment in Mol Sullivan’s video, shot entirely on a phone using the MoshUp app.
“MoshUp collapses one vignette into the next, glitching out and melting the seams,” says Sullivan. “The only honest way to shoot a video for a song this relentless was to trade mutations for cuts. Josh’s arrangement never really stops to breathe, so neither does the picture. Twitchy, pixelated scenes spasm and refuse to resolve—tripping the whole time and never quite landing.”
By Evert’s count, the finished product involved 124 wardrobe changes and 69 videos transferred from the phone to his computer. “It features a scene you really have to look for,” he says. “It was my first time attempting to skateboard nude, much less on camera.”
We’re proud to premiere Josh Evert’s “The Sound Of Machines” video.
—Hobart Rowland