At the beginning of this month, Sergio and Clarice Assad launched a video project called SIDE by SIDE. The project was conceived to respond to the current limitations of shelter-in-place by creating videos of song performances featuring guest artists from around the world. Those guests will join vocalist Clarice and guitarist Sergio in the creation of innovative videos that convey the impression of an ensemble even though the performers are physically distant from each other. As of this writing, two videos have been released through Facebook Watch, the first on July 1 and the second this morning.
The first video presents “Passarela” (passageway), written jointly by Sergio and Clarice. The guest artist is guitarist David Russell. Presumably, this consists of recordings from three separate venues, each of which basically presents a single musician against a dark background. Composite images are then constructed, first of the two guitarists, subsequently joined by Clarice for the vocal sections. This is “bare-bones” video editing, resulting in the illusion of the three musicians sitting side-by-side in a single space.
Screen shot of the opening of “Artístico,” showing the video of Sergio playing his guitar embedded in an array of artist’s tools
The second video presents “Artístico” (artistic) a song written jointly Sergio and Daniel Basilio, which I first encountered on the Assads’ album Relíquia (relic). For this performance the second guitarist is Elodie Bouny. Both the imagery and the video editing are far richer in this video. In keeping with the title, there is a rich assortment of colored pencils, paints, and the brushes that apply them. Frequently, the performers themselves are embedded into this setting. Through image transformation, they can appear as the “work in progress” of a drawing or painting. The video of Bouny frequently appears as if she is an animated figure on a canvas. At one point the camera pulls back on that image, and we see her beside a colored-pencil drawing of Sergio, occasionally making eye contact with her for their duo performance.
Both of these videos are short, between three and five minutes in duration. The first is a simple exercise in creating the illusion of the musicians sharing a common space. The second develops a narrative that parallels the lyrics that explore the interplay between the images created by an artist and the reality that inspires those images. I, for one, am curious as to what images will be evoked in the third video, once it has been released.
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