Reigning Cement, an audio-visual project pairing a 100-page book of Jesse Draxler’s photography and collage work with a collection of music created by musicians handpicked by Draxler, arrives on September 4 via Federal Prisoner.
The concept behind the audio portion of Reigning Cement was inspired by an experiment that Draxler participated in a few years ago, in which a group of collage artists were each given the exact same packet of visual assets with which to create a piece. Similarly, Draxler provided each musician on Reigning Cement with the same 34 sonic elements—all recorded in the noisy industrial environment just outside his studio in Los Angeles.
Today, Juxtapoz offers a second preview of the 22-track collection, debuting a video for VOWWS’ “Them.” Revolver had previously debuted a video for Dylan Walker’s (Full of Hell) track, “Time reign cement.” "Rizz from VOWWS and I go a ways back, we've become great friends and I have a lot of respect for her creativity and vision,” says Draxler. “I've created album art and merch designs for VOWWS, we collab together on a clothing project called VowwsX, we always have something in the mix. This video came about rather casually. Before the idea of videos even came about Rizz volunteered to create one for their track so I shared all of my suitable assets with her. It was the first video created for this whole project, and like the last video for Dylan's track all the footage was shot by me and edited by Rizz, with both of us acting as directors."
“Working with limited sounds meant we had to listen in detail to each recording over and over to get an idea of which parts might work for what,” said VOWWS. “It was hypnotic, like the recordings were saying something, and rhythms started to present themselves and connect to each other in a specific way. It felt like there was a song already in there somewhere, we were just trying to coax it out."
Like the audio elements, all of the images included in Reigning Cement are products of Draxler’s immediate industrial environment. “The photographic images are all from my neighborhood,” he confirms. “That’s very much a part of the concept. There are images that I wanted to include that would’ve worked really well in the book, but I didn’t put them in because I took them in Japan or something.”
