Been wondering what peppy Brazilian trio Bonde do Role have been beavering away on lately? Muse no more as they’re back with a video (with an assist from ScionAV) for last year’s Diplo-produced “BANG,” a track that featured vocalist Kool A.D. described as “a highly oceanic number with a Jodorowsky-esque video — all in all a solid spectacle for the kids.” In practice this means the gang trooped out to a secret island nestled away in Santa Catarina in the south of Brazil and attempted to emulate their favorite sci-fi desert scenes from flicks Dune, Mad Max, and Star Wars. While there, the group took on fantasy character roles and hammed it up for the cameras for a bizarro story involving an attempted abduction of Princess Taylor.
After shooting, the footage was processing in a deliberately lo-fi manner. As Pedro D’Eyrot from the group explains, “After we had the video done, we told the director, ‘We want to trash it and we want it done the real way.’ People nowadays want to add Adobe After Effects on everything, but we did not want that so we did it the old-school way: two messed up tapes from the ’90s and two VCRs, copying the video back and forth in a loop. And that’s how we got this lovely lo-res VHS feel.”
Talking about Kool A.D.’s guest turn on the track, Pedro recalls, “When he first emailed us his verse we thought, ‘WTF? This guy has out-randommed us!’ In the original version he sent us he even sang the chorus to Sergio Mendes’ ‘Mais Que Nada’ on top of everything, which was a lovely mess.” The ex-Das Racist’s man’s warbling didn’t make the cut due to copyright reasons, but Pedro says his contribution to the song “really helped achieve this feeling of a pleasant chaos.”
As the “BANG” flick closes out, Princess Taylor is seen riding off into the hazy desert, but Pedro promises this won’t be the last appearance of singer Laura Taylor’s character. “If everything goes right,” he says, “in a couple of months the video for our song ‘Picolé’ will be out and folks will see more of Princess Taylor.” Prep your VHS players to record.
