Crushed Out
Recently Brooklyn spousal duo Frankie Sunswept & Moselle Spiller of Crushed Out shared the cosmic bodies of water Alien Ocean with the world where the two ordered arrangements of modern pop tropes with heavy guitar hooks in sequences of their own choosing. Frankie & Moselle together kick up big swathes of distortion like smoke screens to provide environments & atmospheres for their own gritty brand & breed of r & r. With news that the band will be gracing San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill venue with their presence November 10; it is our pleasure & privilege to present the world premiere for Crushed Out’s video for “Big Woolly” directed & visualized by the multidisciplinary artist Preston Spurlock.
For Crushed Out’s “Big Woolly” visual experience, the duo parties down with a Snuffleupagus costume as they play up the big winter single to the hilt. Preston Spurlock provides that throwback vintage analog look that is practically everything that you imagine the video for “Big Woolly” would look like as Sunswept & Spiller sing out a crunchy-chorded tribute to a snowed-in sort of love that is on a mammoth-sized scale. Spurlock provides all the super-VHS video thrills as Crushed Out go out on the furry prowl & crawl to cuddle up a woolly beast of their very own in a humorous, head nodding, fist shaking that takes your rocking winter desires on a rocket back to the ice age. Preston’s direction gives the video a public access approach to something that looks like what might happen if the Nat Geo channel decided to go lo-fi with their video-tech values. “Big Woolly” is the audio visual experience to keep you feeling warm yet cool as you brave the cabin fever season of ice & snow.
Describe the oceanic & cosmic & foreign inspirations that informed Alien Ocean.
Alien Ocean is many things to us. A place or an idea that was always familiar suddenly feeling so alien. The feeling that nature is very alien to our species in modern life. Our experiences as independent artists traveling these vast spaces of modern North America. The very strange idea that someone of this planet can be an alien, or an illegal to another people. There is equal awe and isolation in these songs. Of course these meanings are only the beginning, and we’d rather hear what the title makes others feel. Water is a strong topic running through these songs. The cosmic questions are always at the tip of the tongue and whispering in the ear. Out of the Blue in particular is concerning human consciousness, emotionally colored thinking, and human contradiction. Seeing things at the surface, aware of the depth yet unable to access it, forced it seems, to ride the tides of emotional reactions. However the way out is to recognize the reactions. Las Vegas and David Lynch are both very Alien Ocean.
Describe the synergistic creative process of Crushed Out & how two go about sketching ouut & fleshing out your songs.
We have learned to embrace that each song will write itself in a totally original way. Sometimes Moselle will inspire the song title, other times a drum riff, even a single line. One song was written when rad blog Foundwaves asked us to contribute a song based on a chapter of Alice In Wonderland for a really cool project. The music is almost always written jamming together, coming up with melodies and rhythms feeding off each other. We record the good bits and revisit them. The songs for Alien Ocean we were writing while recording. This seems to give the tracks a rehearsed yet fresh feeling, like they always existed yet are brand new.
We want to know the whole behind-the-scenes stories behind the making of the Preston Spurlock video for “Big Woolly”.
Preston Spurlock is a brilliant visual artist/musician, an old friend of mine from the NYC anti folk scene via The Sidewalk Cafe. I was admiring his latest work of taking VHS tapes and tripping out the footage making collages with distortion and crazy colors. I asked him if we could work together on a video for a song concerning cloned woolly mammoths, and he got right on it, buying rare and weird VHS tapes off Ebay. Moselle made a life size woolly mammoth head, and we shot some footage in our studio. Moselle did some effects to the footage, and when paired with Preston’s work the result is this rad collaboration! We are super proud of the result and want to thank Preston for his excellent work.
2017 hopes, plans & dreams?
We are touring Europe in Spring and North America again a few times. Hope to record more songs, and release some recordings of other artists on our label Cool Clear Water Records.
Favorite current Brooklyn artists that you all adore?
Caged Animals and Feral Foster always. Really love Joanna Sternberg, Prima, Not Blood Paint, Savants, Mystery Lights, King Isto’s Tropical String Band, too many to name really!
Crushed Out’s Alien Ocean is available now.
