Noush Like Sploosh Q&A Pt. 2

We ask the wonderfully talented singer/songwriter some questions to find out more about her upcoming grandiose, music video slash art installation project for the single '3 Act Circus'. Read below to get an idea about the project and the music.

First part of the interview can be found here.

Ok, so let’s talk about ‘3 Act Circus’ and the accompanying project/video. Is that something you’ve always wanted to do - a collaborative art project?

I like collaborating because there's a kind of weird thrill when you find the right person with the right chemistry and the first signal is the bizarre coincidence factor, which I figure is because you tune into a compatible frequency.  I remember messing around with some friends one summer in Banff, Alberta, and we had some whole performance based on this "Total Art" concept which is pretty normal really, but we thought we were geniuses: live painting that was directly being inspired by a live musician that was being inspired by a spoken word poet who was riffing off the painting; so a little recycling plant of creativity (it wasn't very good in practice but it was a cool idea).  Anyway, the idea of having this multi-dimensional world for a single story has always been a pursuit in some way or another even though I've just managed to articulate what I'm doing.

I wanted to do a music video because I knew I could do the animation for it, and I missed doing it, and I wanted to know what would happen if I put all my skills together at the same time.

How did it all come to life?

I wasn't actively planning it at first, I wrote the script while I was procrastinating about doing something else.  But writing the first draft made it seem real and I was giving form to the belly-tingles. As soon as I had it on paper, the technical breakdown started happening automatically and I realized it was a very do-able project. At some point my lightbulb came on about Fathima Mohiuddin's work, which I'd seen at an exhibition of her's earlier in the summer, called Skin, where she had her mark-making on bodies.

I rarely respond to visual art this strongly, but there's something about her work where I know she's been tuned in for a long time and that "other world" to which I believe all artists are mediums for - that flow's been happening to her for a long time.  Her stuff really hits me deep in the gut, and I just love it.  And luckily for me, she liked the song and agreed to the concept: to see her marks animate themselves on the characters & environment. She spent three weeks in my garage during pre-production, painting & drawing on everything. She won the Sheikha Manal's Young Artist Award for her 2 series of enormous ink & charcoal pieces that were the scenic backdrops (though I don't think that term does them justice to their visual impact in the film).  While she painted & drew, I made the costumes & props & got the set built and organized the shoot.

We didn't actually have any photographers in the project until a few days before, when I sat in the living room and had a panic attack because I realized there was no way I could shoot it myself. I'd seen Mansoor Bhatti's work online and funnily enough, our mutual friend, Diya Ajit (another amazing artist) walked into my place exactly as I was panicking and got him on the phone and ordered him to do it (which he did after receiving the storyboard).  He liked it and got his friend, Sherif Mokbel, another superb photographer with a great sense for cinema, on the project and that was the core team.  I roped in a bunch of really amazing friends as crew and they did everything from taking continuity notes to blowing bubbles.

Is the project inspired by the song – or did you pen the song with something of that detail in mind?

The lyrics of the song and the images in the video are pretty obviously tied up together, and the song itself is really just three character sketches. I wrote the song with my brother, and that happened as a spontaneous collaboration while we were recording a solo demo ages ago. While he was putting the instrumentation together in front of me, I was writing the lyrics, and we slapped down a scratch and that released in Bombay and got a lot of response.  When I write lyrics, I see images a lot of the time (that's the back of the head contribution) and the video is those images.

When you have so much talent working on one project do you find there to be an ‘ego-clash’?

I pretty much had given up on collaborative projects after Bombay, when I got screwed over on one project and a great relationship was destroyed over another. I don't like working alone because it’s lonely, obviously (in fact I wrote a song about it), so I was worried about the shoot being overly stressful and disorganized.  Also this was the first time that I was in the leadership role as a director in a sense; I'd invited these hugely talented pro's into my garage to help me create this "vision" and basically, I needed to get my sh*t together because they didn't know me and certainly weren't going to put up with any half-a**ed set up.

I got so incredibly lucky to work with such skilled people, with whom I shared aesthetic values (as we happily discovered over the shoot), with whom we did have artistic disagreements, but somehow managed to build a trust to flow with the other's idea, and who really didn't get freaked out by the obvious technical and budgetary restrictions (5 set ups in a 20'x20' room with 3 x 1k lights and no dimmers).  In fact as the shoot went on, they got more excited about new shots and ideas; the level of creativity in that room was inversely proportional to the amount of sleep we were all getting.

Do you plan to go all out for your other videos?

I want to make a series of these "illustrated songs", I feel like I've finally found my medium in this. Hopefully this video will create some avenues for proper funding & a more structured exhibition platform, and a growing viewership.  I've got the concept for the next video, which needs to be developed into a script. If I can focus on my stomach for long enough, hopefully I'll finish it.

Which do you prefer - performing your material live or immersing yourself in such a creative process?

I really like both. I miss things when I don't do them; right now I really miss playing music by myself and writing and indulging in that process but as soon as I get into that, I miss the intensity and the demanding challenge of performing and creating a connection with a group of strangers.  And the shoot was really magical, as flaky as that sounds, but I've been on shoots before and never experienced or witnessed this kind of intense synergy & levels of freaky coincidences.

'3 Act Circus' Premiere at the jamjar gallery in Dubai - fur further information about the event click here.

Video Teaser for '3 Act Circus'