Photo by Anthony Mehlhaff
If our premiere of the insane new video from Squid Pisser is your introduction to this avant grind collaboration between Tommy Meehan (guitar) and Seth Carolina (drums), you’re getting a pretty accurate representation of what this project is about. The Southern California duo enlisted a whole bunch of friends to guest on the album—John Clardy (Tera Melos), Yako (Melt Banana), Joseph K. Karam (The Locust), Arrow DeWilde (Carolina’s bandmate in Starcrawler) and others—and the results are bonkers.
The video we’re presenting, “My Tadpole Legion,” is the title track from the new album and features a frantic vocal performance from Yako and a typically math-y and brutal drum performance from Clardy. The surreal video was directed and animated by Juicy Jaden of the Flesh Files. Editing and VFX were done by Meehan. Squid footage was filmed by Mike Manasewitsch of blockbustervideo.org
My Tadpole Legion was mixed by Kurt Ballou and mastered by Alan Douches at West West Side Music. It will be co-released by Sweatband (Meehan’s label) and Three One G on limited edition vinyl—“tadpole blob” variant for Sweatband and “tadpole splatter on piss yellow” for Three One G—on April 14. You can place your preorder here.
This is what Tommy Meehan had to say about the video:
“While my band Deaf Club was on tour with Melt Banana last year, Yako and I briefly talked about trying to shoot a music video for ‘My Tadpole Legion’ together. Unfortunately our hectic schedules wouldn’t allow for it so I decided that we should do an animated video instead. Juicy Jaden (of The Flesh Files) had hit me up around this time wondering if Squid Pisser would wanna do a collaboration of some kind and things just worked out perfectly.
Jaden is this 23 year old freak artist who lives in Eugene, Oregon and he makes these weird, gross little meat characters and collage art. He ran with the loose direction of creating these fucked-up little “tadpole” creatures. I think that what he came up with for the video is demented and perfect.
Seth and I shot a couple of quick little clips with our main cinematographer pal Mike Manasewitsch of blockbustervideo.org (who also directed and edited our video for ‘Liquified Remains’) and then I took the animation and footage and just spazzed it all out together in editing.
I think there are a lot of profound and poignant messages being blasted at you during this onslaught of visual absurdity. You’ll need to really peek beneath the logs and the lily pads and the pond scum to find them though.”
