Mike Adams isn’t comfortable with the ‘lyric video’ phenomenon, the recent trend of official music videos doing double time as karaoke. “Maybe it’s because it’s ‘new’ and I’m ‘old,’” the mastermind behind the musical act Mike Adams At His Honest Weight, says. “But I don’t like to be ruled by my fears, so here I am participating anyway.”
Well, “participating,” but with a surprising twist. In lieu of a traditional music video, one of the songs from his new album, Guess For Thrills, has a companion ninety page booklet. The downloadable zine is available free online and features riffs, reflections and visual accompaniment to almost every lyric of the tune “Basement Spacemen.” Call it a zine music video, with each page showcasing photography, collage, graffiti, further flavouring the indie tune. It also functions as a lyric sheet for anyone who wants to sing along.
“I figure, if I have to be forced to live in this modern, cold and digital world, I can at least point to the physical objects that I love while I’m doing it,” says Adams.
The zine feels a lot like reading a good comic, with the lyrics and images coming together to give the reader new insights into the kind of basement creativity multi-instrumentalist synth-pop auteur Adams specialises in. It brings to mind Jack Stauber’s animated music videos on YouTube, with loads of creative ideas being blasted at the audience with every lyric, and a clearly purposeful “handmade” look and feel. Adams chose to host the zine on the Internet Archive due to the site’s ‘flipping’ function for books and PDFs, which mimics a real book.
“Basement Spacemen” is personal to me, and the visual imagery that singing it brings to mind felt appropriate for a zine,” says Adams. “A little obsessive, a little abstract, and a weird blend of known and unknown feelings.”
Guess For Thrills is available from Joyful Noise Records. The “Basement Spacemen” zine is available on Archive.org.