Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds guitarist, George Vjestica, shares a new Bandante music and video project in collaboration with artist Timothy Shepard. When not performing with the Bad Seeds, George Vjestica is the driving force behind Bandante who collaborates with other musicians, artists and film makers on the project. George teamed with artist Timothy Shepard to create a compelling video for the latest offering “So This Is Now”. Timothy Shepard is an American contemporary fine artist based in London who uses collage working in 2d, film making and music composition.
Work on “So This Is Now” began at Vale Studios with the recording of an instrumental piece written by George. Joining him were musicians, Ian Matthews (Kasabian) on drums, Nikolaj Torp (The Specials) on Hammond and Mellotron, and Tim Hutton (Dub Pistols, Prodigy) on horns.
About working with Tim, George says: “I’ve known Tim for a while – he lives up the road from me in Notting Hill and we’d often meet for a coffee. Our conversations always ended up trying to figure out what the fuck was going on around all the talk of Trump, Brexit and the rest of it. This continued during lockdown over the phone. I asked Tim if he would make a short film set to this piece of music I’d recorded in Vale Studios… He came back with what was, to me, a stunning piece of art. The music had the soul and the film, a ‘visual lyric’, had the mind and the conscience. It’s a hopeful, sad yet defiant, audio/visual collaboration that, in some visceral way, reflects the times we are living in right now.”
For the project, Tim made a film comprised of hundreds of sequenced cut-up and collaged images, in which we are shown a world through a dystopic like window of now, teetering on collapse and chaos with a message of only-hope that, “the power of the people is greater than the people in power”.
Tim explains: “We are at a moment of choice. George and I would talk about this a lot, and in great part the collaborative process with George and what informed the making of the film were these conversations – about how this point in human history is so pivotal – when we either have global social, economic, and climate collapse or we don’t. It is by no means impossible that we can achieve an understanding whereby we can live sustainably and flourish. There is this idea of decentralizing the power which is very interesting – whether it’s the media or politicians or whatever force that is enacted in order for us to behave in a certain way or impart some ‘truth’ – and in place of all that we could bring about a more collaborative sense making approach. We’ve all “had enough of reading things by neurotic-psychotic pig-headed politicians. To get ourselves to a good place we’ve got to take an honest and positive look at ourselves – realise and empower ourselves. But because we’re all guilty of something, if not the same faults we point out in others. Change must start with ourselves and be enacted upon even more urgently than the call for others to change.”
So This Is Now is currently available to watch on YouTube