Even though Pitchfork is one of the top taste-making champs of documenting the independent music scene they still tend toward pretention in their reviews and music coverage, making me cautious to jump on the three-pronged bandwagon without checking things out first. But I have to give them props this time because back on April 7th, they launched Pitchfork.tv, “a music video channel dedicated to the coverage of independent music” via music videos, live footage, interviews and growing archives for older independent music videos. And since April, I’ve found some helpful ingredients to the Live Exhaust experiment.
Browsing through their collection I came across two videos that gave me both renewed insight and much desired background info about two bands(Justice and ESG) I’ve covered live.
The first video is an interview with French electro-house rockers Justice. Pitchfork’s Dave Maher does a good job of getting right to the point and asking the duo about the use of the illuminated cross during live shows and on the album artwork. Justice’s comments about using the “cross” not for religious reasons specifically but for the general idea of building community between them and fans during the perfomance answered some questions I had when I saw them and after watching the interview new questions came up that we’ll get into on future posted experiments.
The second video was ESG’s last live show at the Abbey Pub as part of Estrojam in Chicago. Even though I knew that ESG’s influence on hip hop had been an important one, I still didn’t get them during the show and so expressed it in my live review. But watching this video I was able to see the show from a different perspective, thanks to P-fork’s multiple camera angles, and pick up on overlooked nuances in the music and the venue atmosphere and the strong emotional vibe of the crowd that I didn’t notice before. I’ve watched the video several times with a new respect for ESG and that show and wish I could go back and have a second try but I guess I’ll have to settle for a recorded version.
Check out Pitchfork.tv and let me know if you get to have a second chance at a renewed impression.