Micaela Tobin Interview: “Break Me” Music Video Premiere

“Break Me” Music Video Premiere

Your music video for “Break Me” was created during an artist residency and was shot around a castle called Civitella Ranieri. Can you tell me a little bit about how the setting and residency experience came to influence the development of the music video?

I was really honored to be nominated and selected as a Civitella Ranieri Fellow this Summer. I had the privilege of spending four glorious weeks living on these ancient castle grounds in central Italy with my very own studio and a group of wonderful artists from all over the world. It was incredibly fruitful, healing, and grounding. I went into the fellowship knowing that I wanted to make a music video, or rather, some sort of visual accompaniment, to my new song, “Break Me” which is on my forthcoming EP called Body Island (Desert Drone).

I didn’t know exactly how I was going to do it, given that I just had my iPhone with me and limited editing skills. However, I enjoy taking the limitations of a situation as a launching point for creative inspiration, and so I just trusted that something would emerge from filming around the castle grounds and merging that with the footage Katie Stenberg and I shot in Los Angeles for the album cover. Plus, how often does one have free access to an ancient castle?? There was no way I was going to pass up the opportunity to film, haha!

How did you come to collaborate with both French director, photographer, and author Véronique Caye and your longtime collaborator Katie Steinberg on putting together the final music video? How did that play out in the shooting and editing processes?

Véronique was also an artist fellow in the same group as me during the residency. We drew a lot of connections between the themes in our work, our style, and energy. She asked me to be in a few shots of her new film and I asked if she would, in turn, help me shoot a few shots for my music video! It was the perfect match!

There was a fabulous intern at the Civitella Ranieri, Anna Sofia Neil, who happened to have just graduated from college last year with a minor in film! She said she had been looking for a project to jumpstart her creative mind since graduation, so I asked if she would be interested in assisting Veronique on shooting and then taking the lead on editing the video together. She took on the momentous task, and I’m absolutely thrilled with the outcome.

Katie Stenberg and I have been working together since around 2017. We tend to work in extreme conditions and push ourselves over the edge – in the best way possible!! Katie and I made the music video for my song, “THOU”, off my 2018 record, Remains (Crystalline Morphologies). For this shoot, I was wearing a custom-made 13-foot-tall dress, standing on a ladder in the middle of Salton Sea in 110-degree weather.

Then in 2019, Katie art directed and shot my album cover for my 2020 White Boy Scream album, BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc). She literally built that entire jungle set in her driveway from scratch, and I sat virtually naked until 4:00 am in that peacock throne in 54-degree weather to get the shots.

The largest project we have collaborated on was my 40 minute opera-film, “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons”, which premiered in 2021 through REDCAT Los Angeles. Katie was the DP and editor. We, along with 2 or 3 close friends, shot guerilla style, for two full nights, standing on jagged rocks in the ocean on a full moon in order to get the final shot we imagined for the end of the film, Again, in extreme conditions, but we managed to make our vision come to life!!

For the most recent shoot for the cover art of the Body Island EP, Katie and I shot inside (for once!) [experimental electronic producer] Baseck’s studio warehouse. I got a kiddie pool, covered it in a pool liner, and we filled it with water, black food coloring, and charcoal dust to give it the effect that I was floating in a dark abyss of space.

We then pushed Baseck’s subwoofers up against the pool and pumped the songs from the EP through them. This made the water vibrate in beautiful ripples, which we then also shot. You can see the water textures in the music video as well! I think it represents the depth of the sounds through a physical space really beautifully. Then, for the final music video, Anna Sofia masterfully edited this footage with the footage Veronique shot at the castle to create a really stunning and cohesive piece.

Your two-track EP, Body Island, offers commentary on Western colonial empires and the need to stay present in global liberation. How do the two tracks, in tandem with one another, explore these ideas either similarly or differently, and what were some of the thematically-related subjects that were on your mind during the process of creating this album?

As descendants of islanders born and raised in the diaspora, I believe we carry our Ancestral land and our liberation within our bodies wherever we are in this world: BODY (IS)LAND. The album cover also symbolizes this sentiment; I was doing a lot of shadow work this year in my personal life and it wasn’t always pretty, so for the album cover I am floating in a pool of dark water, an abyss, and in the reflection of the dark pool my face is distorted and not-of-this-world.

When we came upon that shot (with the help of our collaborator, Patria), we gasped because it felt like an Ancestor was jumping out at us. It was unexpected and perfect.

“Sonic Prayer” is dedicated to the Palestinian people. I included voice memo recordings from the protests I attended, and repeated the phrase over and over, “We Have Blood On Our Hands.” I was (and still am) trying to find a way to exist within the dissonance of living in the “belly of the beast” that is the American empire. I’m trying to fight the numbness, dissociation and freeze that creeps in while constantly watching the genocide in Gaza unfold on my phone, amongst all the other atrocities that exist in the world. I think I made this music to shake myself awake. To scream into the void: we cannot get used to this, we cannot give up, and we must continue fighting.

The second half of “Sonic Prayer” is a harsh noise deconstruction of a racist Navy song from the American Philippine War. I am working on re-composing and subverting a series of these songs for an upcoming project, but wanted to include the first in this series on this EP. I included it on this track to show how our histories of colonization and liberation are intertwined and in solidarity with one another.

“Break Me” is an acknowledgement of the capitalist burnout and subsequent spiritual dissociation those of us feel, living as tools of the western colonial war machine. On a personal level, It is also a reflection on aging and on the people that have come and gone in my life.

“Time’s burden is a night-blooming flower…maybe this time, I’ll stay.”

None of us are safe or shielded from the burden of time; aging and dying are inevitable, and the people we love come and go at different points. I think there is also a very specific feeling of nostalgia for a time and place that I can’t quite articulate. I think that the music video in particular captures these indescribable feelings very well.

Is there anything else you would like to share or add regarding the music video or your album?

Yes! For this EP, I had the honor of working with experimental electronic producer Baseck! He produced, engineered, mixed, and mastered it. This was the first time I incorporated electronic rhythms and driving beats into my music, and I think the outcome is really powerful. The textures he added and attention to detail really makes the music so much more vibrant and colorful. We also put out a single called “BAKUNAWA: BURN,” which is not exactly a remix of the previous album, but more of a continuation or addition. We took sounds and lyrical themes from the record as well as my opera, APOLAKI, and built upon it to make a real banger. I love making music that people can really move their bodies to, and I’m looking forward to putting more music out together in the future!

I’m also excited to put this EP out digitally and in physical format on CD through a wonderful Tucson-based experimental music platform and label called Desert Drone, run by a great artist named Zack Hansen. I have a lot of love for the Southwest and have toured quite a bit through Arizona and New Mexico. Tucson is one of my favorite places to go write and decompress, so I was thrilled when I connected with Zack to play his Desert Drone music series last year. He recently also put out my White Boy Scream 7″ square lathe cut single called “In the Belly of the Beast,” which we recorded in Tucson at Single Outlet Studios. I’m looking forward to building more connections between the experimental music scene in Tucson and here in Los Angeles.

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