Human Performance by Parquet Courts with an exclusive interview with singer Andrew Savage and artist Phil Collins

Purple TV presents the exclusive music video premiere for Parquet Courts Human Performance. The title track is taken from their new album ‘Human Performance’, out now on Rough Trade Records. In regards to the title-track singer-songwriter Andrew Savage explains, “I was focusing on the malfunctions of my own humanity, in relation to a specific series of events in my life, which could not be ignored. It’s meant to be a bit self-evident by the way puppets are used in the video. As I see it, humanity is something that’s partly performed and party instinctual. Like puppets, we sometimes are controlled by parts of ourselves that we never really become acquainted with, but are always there. This song is me confronting that shadow.”

The music video was, conceived, directed, and puppeteered by renowned English visual artist (and Turner Prize nominee) Phil Collins. “I was thinking about the track and how it paints a break-up both elliptically and with such devastating directness. And I wondered what it would be like if this drama was enacted not through naturalism or authenticity but through its partners in crime, doubling and artificiality. So puppets seemed an obvious choice,” said Collins. “A puppet is a complex beast, animated by a human but which also, conversely, brings the puppeteer to life. I thought this kind of dialectics could work well with Andrew’s lyrics, and also found it funny to give starring roles to puppets in a track called Human Performance.”

Recorded over the course of a year against a backdrop of personal instability, Human Performance expands on their 2014 record Content Nausea, picking apart the anxieties of modern life, making it the bands most ambitious record to date. “Time can do a lot of things, but if the idea is there, if you know what you want to say and you say it directly, well, theres no amount that is going to make what you say clearer or more powerful. In fact, that sort of site-specific type of emotion can really become diluted,” said Savage to Purple. “In the case of Human Performance, I know that I was operating from a place of severe pain and confusion, that could not immediately be articulated, that needed to be explored, but some days I just didn’t have any interest in doing that, so some songs came slower. It’s a different type of meditation, and depending on how you look at it, it could be called “less spontaneous” or “more considered.” I don’t know which really, maybe it’s both, but I am confident that the decision to take as long as we did on the album was a necessary one.”

Read the full interview here !

The band is announcing the August 19th release of the “Performing Human” 12″, which will feature an alternate take of “Human Performance” as well as remixes of the song by Eaters and Chris Pickering from Future Punx. “Performing Human” is available to pre-order on Rough Trade Records. The band will be on tour from August 19th, playing in cities such as New York, Austin, Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Milan, London and more.

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