The most complex logistical aspect of the project is simply that four of the eight people present are named Chris or Kris, which makes things difficult if someone’s looking for a prop and you say “Chris has it.” Taylor recently left Brooklyn and rented this house with a friend. It’s not much of a set, for the record: Only eight people, band and magazine tagalong included, in a house in the woods near Germantown, New York, where the neighboring drive sports copious signage regarding private-property ownership, and you experience that upstate hyperdensity of deciduous trees that makes you feel like the planet must be all set on deciduous trees for a while still. Drummer Chris Bear, who has an extraordinarily sweet and peaceful air about him, spent early afternoon wandering sweetly and peacefully around the set in an inflatable neck-traction device. A nurse arrives tomorrow to draw blood, about which bassist Chris Taylor, who has a fear of needles he’s eager to confront, seems sort of pugnaciously psyched. The storyboard sees him zooming into that material to see all manner of creative energy fizzling inside. The video, he says, is about “extracting creativity-if the creativity of any living creature could be seen, what would it look like?” So he’s arranging “extractions” from the band members’ bodies: hairs being plucked, nails clipped, tears shed. “I do have a scab we could pick at,” he offers, exhibiting the back of one hand. Today Moyes needs to photograph someone from Grizzly Bear taking a razor blade and excising a piece of his own skin.Įd Droste, one of the band’s singers, has a long aquiline nose and a sardonic gargle of a laugh, which is his initial response to this development. Now Kris Moyes, the owlish Australian director who’s shooting “A Simple Answer,” has brought them a sinister pile of props, including surgical scissors, electrodes, IV tubing, and a curved linoleum knife that becomes truly terrifying when you remove it from a home-improvement context and place it in a medical one. For 2009’s “ Two Weeks,” they sit like a row of ventriloquists’ dummies, sporting creepily docile grins as their heads distend and explode with light. In 2007’s “ Knife,” they’re seen sinking stoically into quicksand.
Grizzly Bear’s music videos have this habit of depicting the band members as suffering, blank and deadpan, through conditions that do not appear comfortable. Photo: Andreas Laszlo Konrath/New York Magazine From left, Christopher Bear, Chris Taylor, Daniel Rossen, and Ed Droste.
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