Videos

Nervous Gender Reloaded × Aaron Ross — Christofascist

The video for Christofascist came together the way the best creative work does — through genuine exchange rather than transaction. Our collaboration with video artist Aaron F. Ross (aka Dr. Yo) was exactly that: a meeting of visions that pushed the piece somewhere neither of us would have arrived at alone. Ross holds an MFA from CalArts School of Film/Video and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and his practice spans experimental animation, video synthesis, and abstract video art — work that has been exhibited at SIGGRAPH, ISEA, and the Exploratorium. From early conversations through final cut, he brought his own artistic intelligence to the project rather than simply serving the song, and that's what made the result something we're proud to stand behind.

The work has since been screened at the UNTHINKABLE Film Festival, won Best Analog Visual Effects at the International Avant-Garde Film Awards, and received a Special Mention at the UK Animations & Music Video Festival. We're honored by that recognition, but the real reward was the process itself — two creative sensibilities in actual dialogue, shaping something that carries both. We're grateful to Aaron for bringing that commitment to this project, and we hope it shows in every frame.

Explore more of his work at dr-yo.com, and follow him on Instagram and Facebook.

Some collaborations travel by plane. This one traveled by the older routes — signal to signal, time zone to time zone, Los Angeles dissolving into Venice dissolving into whatever hour it was when the message finally arrived.

Bernardino Costantino, operating out of Venice under the sign of carbon and voltage, encountered Kyrie/Mantra and recognized something in it — or it recognized something in him. The track pulls from two of the medieval West's most persistent vocal forms: the Dies Irae, that medieval sequence cataloguing the terror of final judgment, and the Kyrie, the plea that has been cycling through human throats for over a thousand years. Lord, have mercy. Nervous Gender Reloaded had run these chants through their own machinery; Costantino took the result and ran it through his.

His visual practice — documented across years at Prossimo a Disintegrazione ("On the Verge of Disintegration") — has always lived in territory he himself describes as visionary, obsessive, grotesque, metaphysical. The collaboration asked for nothing different. The band extended complete creative autonomy: take it where you want to take it. Feedback was offered, conversation continued across the lag of continents, but the destination was Bernardino's to choose.

What came back was a video that understood the song from the inside — that the Kyrie is not comfort, it is acknowledgment. That mercy begins with the admission that something vast and indifferent has been watching. The disintegration was always already in progress.

(after Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band)

Nobody told Bernardino Duccio Costantino and Nicola Rettino to be serious about it. That was the point.

The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's We Are Normal is a declaration made by people who are obviously, gloriously, defiantly not — which is perhaps the most normal thing anyone has ever done. Nervous Gender Reloaded brought it across decades and handed it to two artists in Venice who function as a single creative organism, their collaboration producing something neither would arrive at alone.

The channel was asynchronous by necessity — chat windows opening and closing across the Atlantic, messages arriving at odd hours, the whole thing forming in the gaps between time zones. Costantino found the song. He and Rettino took it from there. The band watched, responded, and mostly got out of the way. Complete creative freedom was the only instruction.

The result is what happens when absurdism meets two artists who take absurdism seriously — which is to say, not seriously at all, which is the only way to take it seriously. We are normal. We are normal. We are normal.

The video is proof of nothing except that sensibilities on opposite sides of the world found each other over the internet and made something none of them would have made alone, and that this is, despite everything, still possible.

Nicola Rettino
https://www.instagram.com/pirillo1978/
https://www.facebook.com/ivan.astroboy.5

Bernardino Costantino
https://www.facebook.com/elemento.carbonio
https://www.instagram.com/volt.b/
http://disintegrazioneof.blogspot.com/

And What About the Bells? — A Tribute to Rozz Williams

And What About the Bells? is a collection of poetry by Rozz Williams — the singular Los Angeles artist whose voice and vision defined the darkest edges of post-punk and goth — edited and brought into print by Ryan Wildstar, Williams's closest collaborator and friend. Published by Eygennutz in 2023 to mark the 25th anniversary of Williams's death, the book gathers three decades of his poetry alongside tributes, interviews, and handwritten journal excerpts.

To celebrate the release, artists from across Williams's extended world were invited to submit readings of his poems, in person or on video. Nervous Gender Reloaded contributed a video of Edward Stapleton reading There is no sound or meaning — a fitting choice, as Edward and Rozz were friends going back to the early Los Angeles days. Matt Comeione wrote and performed the music, playing guitar, bass, and synthesizer over programmed drums, and also filmed and edited the video.

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