Bryan Beller, acclaimed bass player with the Aristocrats, Joe Satriani and Dethlok, has released a music video featuring two of his own songs, A Quickening and Steiner In Ellipses. Both are talen from Beller's critically acclaimed double prog concept album, Scenes From The Flood, which was released in 2019.
Peller himself plays five characters (including himself, a nerdy accountant, a hipster douchebag, a cross-dressing keyboardist, and an ageing rocker,) in the video, which you canwatch in full below, and it also features special guests Gene Hoglan, Mike Keneally, Rick Musallam and Kyle Hughes,
":When COVID hit, at first, I really had no idea what to do creatively,” says Beller. “It was all such a shock, the sudden cancellation of everything, everyone stuck at home. So I thought, I’ll just wait and observe. Lots and lots of screen time, you know? And then I realised – as musicians, creators, and just as people, we’re all doing the same thing, aren’t we? So let’s tell a story about what humans try and do with that.”
The result is a frenetic and radical deconstruction of a typical play-through video. Beller’s four characters play their parts in earnest as a critical chorus of social media commentary appears on-screen with near machine-gun frequency. Eventually the accountant, the hipster, the cross-dresser and the rocker all check their own social media accounts and read the comments, to their abject horror. The second half of the video then takes a hard metal turn before a plot twist brings the characters together for the grand finale… or does it?
“It occurred to me that we could create a phenomenon where the viewer, in real life, is watching this video, probably on a social media platform with the ability to comment, about characters performing and posting on a social media platform while people comment about them, and then they log on to their own social media accounts and read those typically horrible comments about themsleves,” says Beller. “It’s pretty world-inside-a-world meta, and more than a little absurd. But that’s where we are these days, aren’t we? All of us, spending too much time inside in front of a screen, doomscrolling and re-examining our lives? I figured, let’s at least have a little fun taking the piss out of all of it. And let’s make the video really fast, really crazy, really over the top and totally in your face.”
