Background

Guided Muscle To Your Heart is a music-video for the track from the 12" EP The Abdominal Wall of Noise.

Credits

Script, direction & editing - Philip Brophy
Performer, body & face - Phillip Jackson

1989

Produced for Present Records, Melbourne

Guided Muscle To Your Heart video stills © 1989

Overview

The images in Guided Muscle To Your Heart fly past as fast and furiously as the music: lacerated faces, giant fuzz boxes, screaming mouths, pounding snare drums, foreheads with popping veins. Subject to the noise, the hapless auditor in the music-video moves from one assaultive zone to the next, living in an endless headache.

Technical

True to the fabrication of music-videos which try their hardest to 'be real', there is no reality to the images in Guided Muscle To Your Heart. There are no guitars - yet a hand plays one. There are no drums - yet a hand pounds a snare. There's heaps of fuzz - but a foot ramps down on an Ibanez pedal without it being plugged in. Like classic 'instrumental rock' demi-gods (think Mike Oldfield, Sweetwater, The Rah Band, The Edgar Winter Band, etc.), Philip videos his hands, arms and feet doing the impossible and playing everything. Poor Phillip Jackson - carrying a great party-trick in being able to almost pop the veins of his head - was subjected to a variety of dizzying physical trials (hanging upside down and screaming, spinning wildly on a playground spinning wheel, etc). Close-ups of his face then pepper the video. No post-FX were used: the images were projected onto billowing sheets, spinning balls and various refracting surfaces. All in all, an apt hall of distorted mirrors to match the music's glistening falsehood.

Guided Muscle To Your Heart video stills © 1989