On April 26, Rizo released the much anticipated music video for “Under,” which was on her most recent album Indigo. The video features astro-goddess imagery pulled together in a rich metaphorical style with notes of glitch art aesthetic. Originally written for The Civilians’ Let Me Ascertain You: F*cking and Dying series, Rizo discusses the song’s evolution to its current iteration in her new music video.
I thought I’d give you a little insight into the process of this particular tune and the long road of art, and below the first incarnation of this song onstage.
In 2014, the edgy Brooklyn theatre company The Civilians, who had just been appointed as the first ever theatre company as Artist in Residence for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reached out to me to write a song for their new performance series. The series is called Let Me Ascertain You and the edition was called F*king and Dying.
They gave me a blog post about Austrian art collective monochrom who was offering a unique opportunity for participants to experience the warping of public and private space: having sex in a coffin while strangers watch you (via infared webcam projected next to the sites where people were ‘buried.’ ) It was surprisingly popular in many cities worldwide. My other source material was an interview with ‘Kitty,’ who was one of the participants in San Francisco who got buried alive with her lover.
I wrote an early version of “Under” for this series and you can watch it in the video below.
You can also listen to the series, including this song, in The Civilians’ podcast via SoundCloud.
It’s very interesting for me to see how the song has morphed. I had forgotten many of these denser lyrics that didn’t make it through rewrites. Below is “Under” in its most recent form and all of its audiovisual glory.
As Yair and I worked on that song, I was listening to a lot of 1960s dance music and we got inspired in the studio to add a boogaloo beat to it. The boogaloo was a mixture of African American rhythm and blues and soul music with mambo and son montuno. It definitely bridged cultures as it also drew scores of young white kids to the dance halls. Sex and death and dancing are probably my three favorite themes; I like having them all in one song. I was very happy that director Shawn Gadley was drawn to this song and thrilled to share it with you.
Now tell me below if you would ever want to have sex in a coffin – webcams or not.
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