In another first for Che Underground: The Blog, here is a never-before-distributed video featuring San Diego’s legendary Mirrors, the luminous successor to the Answers. Guitarist and producer Dave Fleminger describes the creative process:
“These tracks are among the Mirrors’ last San Diego recording sessions, around June 1985. As with all Mirrors sessions, they were made in my bedroom with one mic and a Teac four-track. The soundtrack is still based on cassette mixes, as these have yet to be properly remixed.
“By the end of that summer we were all in San Francisco, part of the mass migration documented elsewhere on the blog. The players are me, Jeff [Lowe] and Anni (on guitar, bass and drums, respectively), with Jeff and me each singing the song that we authored.
“This video was one of several student projects I did at CCAC (now CCA) in Oakland, ’85-’86. The footage was shot with a clumsy black-and-white beta camera and shoulder-pack unit and then colorized using the school’s analog modular video synthesizer (patched with BNC cables), which could assign colors to shades of gray and countless other nifty tricks.
“There are also some experiments with video feedback, shots of driving through the Caldecott tunnel, signs and industo spaces around Oakland, my dog and Bruce Haemmerle’s cat. The smokestack factory and the ‘doll-field’ were near Antioch, and while I was shooting around there I noticed I was being followed by some creepy security personnel in a white van.
“When they finally turned off the engine, got out and started walking toward me, I took off.”
I didn’t have a cat until 1988 although I was living at your studio just around the time you made videos
Delightful time capsule of the 1980’s.
There’s almost no other era in which these sounds and visuals were possible.
Brilliant, really.