Some music is so intertwined with your past that a list of albums is less a discography and more like flipping through a photo album and scanning the timeline of your life story. That’s what Clem Snide (Eef Barzelay) is to me, a voice that has been in my head for decades. Can I tell you why his music means so much to me?
Your Favorite Music played in my dorm, the college years when I spent every spare minute locked in a basement studio, trying to master collage, photography, and screen printing.
The Ghost of Fashion found me graduating, the year I cluelessly entered the workforce and wondered if my time as an artist was behind me.
End of Love accompanied me in the office just as my graphic design career was finding legs. “Fill Me With Your Light” to this day fills me with delight every time it shuffles on my running playlist. Suburban Field Recordings is burned on a CD marked by the handwriting of a co-worker in Sharpie.
The Meat of Life was a partner during many long runs. Stoney will forever be connected to Horsetooth Mountain, a trail run at the end of a brutal marathon training season where the lyrics “am I ever to feel that free again” managed to keep me on my feet as I descended the mountain.
Last year Oh Smokey calmed my nerves in Las Vegas, played through noise cancelling headphones as I wandered, overstimulated, through casinos looking for places to lose my stickers of hummingbirds.
Recently Eef’s cover of “The King of Carrot Flowers, Part 1” hit me as I was wandering on the railroad tracks, lost in the beauty of rusting paint and fading marks of graffiti artists that I’ll never meet. The song moved me. The lyrics are dark, but strangely hopeful, delivered with Eef’s gut-punching sincerity that cuts me to shreds.
I reached out to Eef to ask if he would be interested in a collaboration. He agreed and I saw the complimentary words of a hero staring back at me. The result of our collaboration is a video combining his music with my experimental animations. Here is how it turned out:
Above the graffiti an image of a man leaps blindly backwards into the unknown. Again and again, an unbroken loop of risk is rewarded by pushing through discomfort. The metaphor rings true. I’m so thankful for the gift of music Eef has shared with me, a true fan.
Stay creative. Your friend,
Ade
so glad I found your work, its awesome !
Wow, that gif is great! Yeah, Vegas... It would be fun to do a sonomontage of that place, it would be intense I think.