One of the goals of Milwaukee Record is to bring you original, high-quality video content that you won’t find anywhere else in town. By teaming up with Honeycomb Productions, we’re doing just that with our new monthly video series, Prop-a-Ganza.
The concept of Prop-a-Ganza is (deceptively) simple: We pair up one band with one director, give them $100 to shop at the always delightful American Science & Surplus, and give them 24 hours to create a music video. Band members can bring in a few personal items—instruments, friends, beer—but the bulk of the video has to involve the props found at AS&S. The result is an on-the-fly experiment that’s part music video, part shopping spree, and part reality show challenge.
For the pilot episode, we tapped one of the city’s best new bands (and proud owner of the seventh best Milwaukee album of the 2010s), Soul Low. Honeycomb Productions’ Kurt Raether assumed the role of director. Their day-long journey begins at American Science & Surplus and ends in a Craigslist-hookup-gone-awry video for Soul Low’s excellent “Tammy.” Here’s what Raether had to say about the production:
“‘Tammy’ is about loving the idea of something, but not the thing itself. You can take that theme in a lot of directions—and I feel like we hint at them here and there—but in the short time we had we pretty much just cobbled together a monstrosity of a creature and turned it into a bad Craigslist hookup story. We were super lucky at 2 a.m. to find a party down the street, and people were cool enough to come over, otherwise Tammy’s big moment in the sun would have been downright depressing.”
Big thanks to Kurt, Ryan Sarnowski, and the rest of the Honeycomb team for their tireless work on the video. Thanks also to American Science & Surplus for making this crazy idea possible. And of course, thanks to Soul Low for taking the initial Prop-a-Ganza plunge. Enjoy.