NYC-based veteran musician and multi-platform artist Gina Volpe, who played guitar in legendary punk band Lunachicks, is still hard at work, and play, on a run of monthly singles since the start of this year. The song series she’s created is named Winter To Spring and will continue through June.
February saw the debut of Volpe’s defiantly seductive “Make It Good”, her second Winter To Spring single, that now arrives in video format on May 17th. Rebel Noise is stoked to host the premiere of this menacing, yet alluring video a day before it’s released to the public.
Once a film and TV set designer, Volpe recruited some of her friends in that industry to work on the video for “Make It Good”. She recalls, “My friend William Amenta is a super-talented DP and was game to shoot the video on his new RED camera.”
Volpe also enlisted the talents of two professional dancers for the shoot, Andrea Ward and Devin Richey, who choreographed their wild, eye-catching moves under the direction of Harry Mavromichalis (director of Olympia, a documentary on Olympia Dukakis.)
As for the substance of the video, Volpe wanted to keep it simple and direct. She relates, “I wanted to make a dance video for this song, but I can’t dance for anything.” Volpe also reveals, “I didn’t want to see humans dancing, I wanted to see something else.”
In a fit of inspiration, Volpe constructed the masks for the dance segements out of old bicycle inner tubes, roofing paper, pipe wrap, and whatever else she could dig up in her art studio in Dumbo.
Amenta shot the video on rooftops in Brooklyn and on an industrial bridge in Maspeth, Queens. It features a clad-in-black figure wearing a full-on scary, animalistic facemask (think Donnie Darko-style). She stalks slowly, but determinedly through the fallen night, with the bright glow of intermittent incandescent lights and real lightning jags sparking up the darkness.
This creature encounters another outfitted-in-back, masked beast and the two begin a wary dance on the river-spanning bridge. Is it a fight or a courtship?
These scenes alternate with clips of the two in choreographed, in sync motion, as well as each alone, throwing down some kick-ass dance moves, until they finally reunite and dance together. This bizarre dream (or maybe nightmare?) emanates from the surreal imagination of Volpe, unfolding in front of NYC’s iconic skyline and against the gritty, yet enticing beat of “Make It Good.”
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