Nun Gun, an award-winning multimedia collaboration between visual artist Brad Feuerhelm and musicians Lee Tesche and Ryan Mahan (Algiers), announces a stunning music video for their reinterpreted deconstruction Bowie’s “The Supermen”. Calling in the talents of vocalist Mark Stewart (The Pop Group, The Maffia), the track is regurgitated into a writhing, slithering dirge broadcast through glowing cathode-ray televisions.
In their latest endeavours, Nun Gun focuses on the genre of horror itself, most notably the troubling sights and sounds of 60s and 70s Italian Mondo, cannibal and zombie exploitation films by Gualtiero Jacopetti, Umberto Lenzi, and Lucio Fulci. Instead of the “savage” tropical climes as employed by the genre’s directors, the exoticism found in original Mondo films has been subverted to look at the failings of capitalism in the West. Musically, this examination finds Tesche and Mahan disassembling, slowing down, and reconstituting the aural hellscapes of Riz Ortolani, Roberto Donati, and Fabio Frizzi’s scores, creating an uncanny and unsettling chopped and screwed cacophony of dubbed out noise, doom-jazz, rap, and post-industrial-stained death disco. They do the same for Bowie in “The Supermen”.
In the process, the duo summon an array of experimental techniques borrowed from tape music vanguard Halim El-Dabh, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Delia Derbyshire; dub and bass culture innovators King Tubby and Scientist; and Houston dance music and rap pioneers Darryl Scott and DJ Screw, drawing a line of inquiry into the musical concept of decay. By embracing the same antiquated resources—various tape recorders, tape echoes, low-bit-rate samplers, and short wave radio equipment—Tesche and Mahan explore the deterioration and abstraction of Feuerhelm’s imagery through decaying frequencies, phrases, and recording mediums.
The video, directed by Sam Campbell, is from the band’s collaborative LP with Mark Stewart, Stealth Empire in Dub. Nun Gun’s debut release, Mondo Decay, showcases an audiovisual dialogue pairing 144 pages of Feuerhelm’s post-industrial gazing photography with an accompanying original soundtrack cassette produced by Tesche and Mahan.
Watch below:
Stealth Empire In Dub is out now—available from Algiers’ Bandcamp on a Limited Edition 12″ Vinyl.
