Video #8

There is a stretch at the end of a taped-over cassette where the old recording survives. Whatever you put on it runs out, the tape keeps turning, and for thirty or forty seconds the summer that was there before you got it is still playing. Water, maybe. Somebody calling a name. You can never quite make it out.

Video #8, Video Girl's eighth tape, is built out of those thirty seconds.

Eight songs, about twenty minutes. The first four sit on the new recording - this side, this year. At the end of the fourth the new recording runs out and the tape keeps going. At the top of the fifth, the layer underneath comes up. The last four belong to a summer nobody can account for.

Nothing here is in a hurry. Even the fast songs don't push. The five voices are close to the microphone, mostly dry, a little detached; the breath before a line and the small noises of a mouth are left in rather than cleaned out. The drums are light, the low end sits still, and there is almost no reverb anywhere. It was mixed to sound like it is being played back on somebody's not very good equipment, in somebody's house.

The first half is near. The second half is far. The same five people are singing, but by the end they sound like they are coming from a different house.

The lead track is "Almost Almost." Its chorus contains no words at all.

The five members of Video Girl are defined by their relationship to a lens and a microphone rather than by biography. The one who meets the lens. The one closest to the mic. The one who doesn't move. The one who walks out of frame. The one who never comes into focus. Normally one of the five is looking at you. On this record none of them is - it isn't footage that was shot for you.

The cover is a photograph of the same idea: a rooftop in high sun, the light blown out to white, five people standing apart from each other. Nobody is looking at the camera. One red sandal is lying on the ground.

Video Girl is the thing that comes out of a tape, stays a while, and goes back. It isn't real, but the comfort it leaves behind is. It belongs to no one, so no one can take it away.

Video #8 resolves nothing and teaches nothing. At the end the tape rewinds and starts again.