Brunson & Mark Prendergast - Hug Your Friends
Among the many legends who pioneered the sound of Midwest techno, Gerald Brunson is a singular voice. Between playing as part of Model 500’s live iteration and operating Dance Sacred Records, the producer and DJ is truly a veteran of the scene, winding his way from working the floor at the legendary Detroit record shop Submerge Records, his early experiments in acid techno as Acid Jakal, linking up with Underground Resistance founder Mike Banks and Juan Atkins, to his current run as Brunson. His new EP, Hug Your Friends, is his first release for Tresor, a long-in-the-making joining of forces that arrives as part of the label’s 30th anniversary celebrations. To mark the occasion, Brunson worked in collaboration with video artist Mark Prendergast to create a short film in support of the project. Never one to settle for the obvious, Brunson began to send Prendergast a collection of diaristic audio and video clips, which together paint a rich and complex picture of a truly enigmatic artist. Touching on his childhood, generational trauma, the American Midwest, his process as a producer and DJ and, above all, the love he has for his late grandmother, Vivian Rowe, Brunson paints a colourful impression of the intimate and at times melancholy space from which his music emerges, parsed through and lovingly stitched together by Prendergast in his inimitable style. “In the same vein as the previous video we made in this series with Terrence Dixon, Gerald sent us a bunch of off the cuff imagery and audio that he felt represented himself in some way,” explains Prendergast. “It was all great material, but one video in particular stood out to us, in which he takes us on a tour of a photo collage which hangs in his kitchen, telling us about his family background and in particular about his grandma.”
"The video takes the form of a journey of reflection and memory, intercut with a road trip to Yuma, Colorado to the patch of land that Rowe was born on, where we see Gerald spread his grandmother's ashes," continues Prendergast. "What we actually is see the surreal moment of him accidentally dropping the bag of his grandmothers ashes to find two CDs he put in there at the time of her passing: one an album by her favourite singer and one a mixtape Gerald made of her favourite music. On a formal level, the juxtaposition between the love for an elderly relative and hard techno was one we were super interested in exploring." From the very first moments in which grandma Rowe is introduced, pictured striding across the plains of Colorado on horse back, these two pillars of Brunson's life are fused together, his description of his grandmother as "a very hardcore woman, period" punctuated by a 4/4 beat, metered out in the lo-fi rhythm of Prendergast's jagged edits. Throughout the film Brunson's voice and the sounds in the background of his recordings are threaded into the machinic pulse of his own primal hardware techno, resulting in an expressive score that captures the intense nostalgia and intimacy of the producer's expansive trips through his own memories. Prendergast annotates Brunson's voiceover with pixellated phrases, scribbled over the top of grainy footage, underlining the scrapbook, patchwork quality of the producer's video and audio, personal recollections animated with his own sounds.
Hug Your Friends is out now, on Tresor Records. For more information about Mark Prendergast and his work you can find him on Instagram.