UH HUH: JOY ON FIRE’S ANTI-GUN ANTHEM BECOMES AN OFFICIAL SELECTION AT SIX INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVALS (AND COUNTING.)

 

Have a watch then learn about the mayhem below. 

John kept playing combinations of “dinn-dinn-dunn” on the bass and I kept saying “uh huh” after every iteration. This was 2018, when he and I first started adding words to music, in my old apartment up the hill, in Adams Morgan, D.C., where you could see the Washington Monument from the living room windows. The amp was thumping; the neighbors must’ve been going crazy. Were there bottles of stout? Why, yes there were. “dunn-dinn-dunn!” // “uh huh!”

I said “uh huh” because I dug the bass line, but it became a regular part of the song’s opening cycle, and eventually the title, too. A change in the lyrics would appear after one of the song’s thumping, electrified transformations. There, the words would speculate on the unknowable: the songs not for the dead but of the dead. Ultimately, “Uh Huh” is an anti-gun anthem. In it, we challenge murderers to atone, by returning the bodies (of those they murdered) to the earth.

 

Importantly, other hands touched the song. Chris Olsen would add the metrical necessity of drums. Anna Meadors added both dirgeful and enraged saxophones; she also devised the refrain (the little loop of singing) at the outro; she engineered the entire recording. In the fullness of time, Mark Isaac and Gabriela Bulisova interpreted the song visually, through a combination of thermal, rippling water, video game, marching, and corporeal imagery. It seems quite accurate.

Even as Covid-19 has prevented us from performing, the video has been gaining traction at several international film festivals. A special thanks to our friends at the Oregon Short Film Festival, London Rocks Film Festival, L.A. Rocks Film Festival, Brussels Independent Film Festival, Hollywood Verge Film Awards, and Rome Independent Prisma Awards. Yo! With a dozen more submissions yet to go! We didn’t have ginormous resources for a big push, thus the level of interest has been especially surprising.

If you are inclined, travel to YouTube and give us a thumb’s up. Give us an “uh huh.” Thanks.

this post is part of a double-issue focused on joy on fire music videos. for behind the scenes at the “thunderdome” video shoot, click [here].

JOY ON FIRE // “UH HUH” // OFFICIAL VIDEO // 2020.

“Uh Huh” is a protest song, during a protest year, during a baffling era.

The lead instrumentation—John Paul Carillo’s bass and guitar; Chris Olsen’s drums and percussion—alternates between harrowing restraint and thumping outcry. Anna Meadors plays the song’s dirge on her alto saxophone; the song, then, absorbs the universal lamentations of people who’ve been deprived of other people. When all four of us participate at once, including the howling vocals, there is a variety of madness that we could call liberation, or honesty. Listeners will be rewarded again and again by the virtuosity of the musicians. The outro, in particular, estimates the emotional quandary of marching forward, despite a societal environment that cannot remediate its own destructiveness.

“Uh Huh” refers to brothers in the universal sense: close and distant family, comrades, colleagues. We are protesting an inexcusable societal blight like gun crimes, on the one hand, but many protests can be echo-located in “Uh Huh.” (What’s your protest?) In the lyrics, a gun is pointed at an unarmed person. This fundamental inequality can transfer from one situation to another. You’re powerless at a crucial moment, you fear for your life, you lack a basic resource. You struggle to envision a future, uh huh.

                                                                 

The artists who created the video—Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac—have stamped their narrative on the song. By turns eerie, disturbing, and deeply righteous, the video commences with the thermal imagery of headless bodies trudging toward a blank destination, at an orderly pace, their backs to the viewer. Without being told, we know that many of them are doomed. There is a gun-scope encircling a partial portrait, and an incongruous flag unfurling, and a litter of human shapes strewn upon a stained ecosystem that’s struggling, itself, to persevere.

“De voi depinde,” said the poet Paul Celan: “It’s up to you.” What he meant was: the individual really matters. By design, the band does not appear. Our faces don’t outweigh the importance of the protest. What will our brothers be singing? What will our, what will our brothers be singing? If we deaden ourselves to loss, we’ll never challenge the status quo.

Play this song loud. Expect punk-jazz. Topple the establishment.

Joy on Fire is

John Paul Carillo (bass, guitar)

Anna Meadors (baritone and alto saxophones, vocals)

Chris Olsen (drums, percussion)

Dan Gutstein (lyrics, vocals)

“Uh Huh” composed by Carillo / Gutstein / Joy on Fire (2020)

Joy on Fire formed in Baltimore 12 years ago and is currently headquartered in Trenton, N.J.  Featured last year on NPR's All Songs Considered, the band is scheduled to play a Tiny Desk Concert in July.  Its most recent release is the Thunderdome EP, which features "Uh Huh," and is available on vinyl only at the Joy on Fire website.  Maryland label Procrastination Records will release the band's next full length album, Hymn, in June. States of America, the band's first full length album with vocals, and which will also include "Uh Huh," is currently being mixed with release plans to be decided.

Video and band photograph by Gabriela Bulisova and Mark Isaac (2020). 

“Uh Huh” is an official selection, PRISMA Rome Independent Film Awards (2020), London Rocks Film Festival (2020), and L.A. Rocks Film Festival (2021).