Londoners Voka Gentle are back with one of my favourite releases of last week, the brilliant (and slightly bonkers, but in the best way) track TV Bra. It’s the final preview of new album Writhing, due via Leafy Outlook on October 22nd and for me, it is the trio at their best. Eccentric and a bit chaotic, but completely alluring – just like the TV Bra itself.
William’s character asks in the track “are you lacking high quality content?” With this video, we’re certainly not. If you’re going to watch one music video this week, make it this one. In the clip, William takes on the role of a somewhat demonic (and all too believable) salesman in a ‘QVC fever dream’ alongside bandmates Ellie and Imogen.
On the track, the band share: “TV Bra began as a joke improvisation inspired by the Korean artist Nam June Paik, who collaborated with the cellist Charlotte Moorman on a piece called TV Bra, where ostensibly she played the cello naked except for two small TV screens over her breasts.”
“The idea was to imagine something like that being commodified and advertised, incorporating the familiar small print and customer surveys and things that you’d expect with something like that nowadays. It’s pretty nonsensical, but we liked the way it almost went down the JG Ballard Crash route of exploring how technology threatens to pollute sex and intimacy in a really violating way. Maybe it’s kind of a cheesy ‘observation on the state of the world,’ but with a bit of humour in there. You can hear the junky prepared piano we created in the studio – we shoved nails, cutlery, Game Boy cartridges, string, crisp packets and all sorts of things into an upright piano.”