Faces of N. – an audiovisual EP celebrating a Berlin fashion icon

Inspiration: Nico’s personal style

Nico Roscher is constantly reinventing herself. Today she’s the lead singer of the Berlin indie glam punk group Lobsterbomb. Back in 2014 she exhibited at Berlin Fashion Week, and in 2015 she was its face. And for good reason. The exploits of her quadruple threat career of fashion model / fashion designer / publisher / studio operator were unparalleled in that era of the Berlin fashion world.

As a model she appeared in numerous high end campaigns, working throughout Europe. Her fashion label Von Bardonitz, a striking blend of the baroque and the gothic, brought haute couture to the otherwise street-fashion focused Berlin scene at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week. Her design network magazine The Offer raised up a generation of young Berlin designers as a collective platform for fashion, photography and live music, while her daylight photo studio CAKE was a sensational hot spot for cultural production and underground music events.

I’d known Nico since 2009. Since the day we met I knew we needed to collaborate. Her personal style is impeccable and this project was all about capturing the essence of her many signature looks while elevating it above style into an entire musical vibe.

One Night + Six Months

The shoot for Faces of N. was nothing like the commercial productions I lead for clients. It had a passionate urgency, a spontaneous playfulness, and a middle of the night focus that client work rarely touches. The same day we decided to shoot I hauled my tripod and camera over to Nico’s rental flat. Together we combed through her wardrobe and she quickly assembled five distinct looks, complete with different shoes and accessories. Names for the looks emerged organically, and pretty soon our palette of outfits was set.

We began the process of documenting the incredibly subtle sounds of Nico getting dressed. Each item was explored for its auditory properties and framed compositionally to show off those qualities. It was a late night that went well past 3am. Video art is often produced in such intimate settings. The relationship between the artist and the subject is easier to navigate when there is no additional crew or technical complexity.

After I caught up on some sleep and threw the footage onto the timeline, I realised I didn’t have material for just one video – I had material for a whole EP.

the night i shot the material I had no idea that i’d be working on faces of n. almost every day for the next half year.

The House Sephora Built

Shortly after shooting the raw material I was flown to Los Angeles to direct a Sephora spot for the production company Portal A. The windfall from the Sephora spot opened up my schedule. Once the cosmetics spot was complete, I was able to indulge in what turned out to be a half-year studio odyssey. Here’s the spot:

Method Composing

For six months, each morning I would leave my Berlin apartment and take two trains to my studio in Berlin Kreuzberg. I would brew a yerba mate and dive into the meticulous world of granular synthesis, EQ, and frame-by-frame micro choreography to painstakingly construct rhythms and motifs that I was culling from a series of playlists I curated. I decided early on that each outfit would emit a different genre of dance music, and I sought to collect together influences that sounded the way I felt the clothes looked. As the project progressed I found my inspiration melting together, so I only ended up creating three playlists:

I had an elaborate compositional process that involved graphic notation, significant time revising minor edits, and quite a bit of dancing around in my studio.

The Microsite

The more I worked on the EP and the closer it got to being finished the more I realised I was creating a work that would truly need its own platform to be experienced in full. I reached out to the extremely talented net artist Cameron Askin and he graciously worked with me on a microsite for the project. Working from my creative brief consisting of sketches and wireframes, Cameron created an elegant, lightweight static microsite that gave each track its own special presentation. I translated the naming conventions I used to keep track of all the samples into language that stood somewhere between how you would credit a band and how you would describe a fashion collection. The resulting interactive experience gives each piece the much needed room to breathe in an otherwise busy social media landscape.

I created custom pixel art inspired by details from each ensemble to serve as backgrounds for the videos. The pixel art process shared a pattern language with the granular synthesis process I used in developing the synth sounds for the pieces.

The Live Performance Debut

The more I worked on the loops embedded within the compositions, a path forward towards a live performance revealed itself to me. We organised a debut at CAKE Studio and I set to the task of creating live sets using Ableton Live and a special iPad-based MIDI controller. Here’s an excerpt from the debut performance:

After the CAKE studio show I performed the EP an additional time as part of a choreographic series called Dialogic Movement held at Berlin’s premiere contemporary music/dance/theater venue Radialsystem.

Press Response

When Faces of N. made its online debut it became a video art scoop for several months, with reviews in English, German, Spanish, French and Italian. Michele Lupi, an editor at Italian Rolling Stone, compared the work favourably to electronic music legends Matthew Herbert and Matmos. And it also appeared on Fast Company, Create Digital Motion, Booooooom, and the much-loved GIF Tumbler Prosthetic Knowledge. See the microsite for full press links archive.

Takeaways

The theme of how clothes impact identity carried on beyond the project. At the 2014 Retune conference in Berlin I had the opportunity to reflect on this resonance in a special presentation of the project inside the framework of a talk on Hypercubist Identity.

I decided to use the opportunity to reflect my own facets of self. I initially appeared on stage calling myself a Director. Over the course of the talk, every time I showed a video from the EP, I went backstage. When the video would end, I would return to stage in a new outfit, only to restart my talk again. Director gave way to Artist, Composer, and finally Theorist. In this way I embodied a holistic praxis of Hypercubist Identity.

Faces of N. Credits

Creative Direction: Gabriel Shalom
Directed, composed and choreographed by Gabriel Shalom
Featuring the performance and wardrobe of Nico Roscher
Colours corrected by Carlos Vasquez
Typography by Patrizia Kommerell
Audio mastered by Thomas von Pescatore
Hypertext designed and built by Cameron Askin