With At Latl on the shelf until further notice, the band’s frontman Kent Watson has redirected some of his artistic focus to POEK. The cross-country recording project—an acronym for “Property Of Eric and Kent”—is a collaboration between Watson and an Idaho musician named Eric Haven. The pair have been writing music together in some capacity for 13 years, but have released just a few songs under the POEK moniker.
Yesterday, the project put out an innovative homespun video for “Taylor The Thing Is.” The song’s visual component combines stop-motion animation and dozens of images cut out of about $40 worth of used books and magazines to appropriately capture a so-called “Indifference Machine” that gobbles up unsuspecting folks and leaves destruction in its wake.
Watson spent more than 40 hours shooting and positioning the cutouts, which include numerous appearances by magician Nicholas Einhorn (whose book of magic tricks also supplied most of the video’s hands), along with people and animals originally featured in National Geographic and Vogue magazines, and even a cameo from Wisconsin-born actor Tony Shalhoub.
The danceably dour electronic tune is the product of recent governmental runaround Watson experienced during a phone call with the Internal Revenue Service. “I was trying to write about this nagging feeling you get when dealing with bureaucracies or companies,” Watson tells Milwaukee Record. “They seem to go out of their way to inconvenience you, confuse you, block you from getting anywhere. It could drive somebody crazy. So for the animation I just wanted to create something really ugly, a conglomerate of inconvenience, that eats everything.”
Mission accomplished.