TSEP created several full-length music videos for their eponymous first album. Of the three, one was written and directed almost entirely by our record label, Ardent Records; one was written and directed by a friend of the band, Chris Dumas; and one was written and directed by the band and by Sergio Valdez. Here they are, in increasing order of sanity.

She Tells Me – this is the one we came up with sans parental guidance. It’s hard to tell, but the object that is striking Mark is supposed to be an errant hunk of Skylab that never fell. In reality, we used a crutch.

Kamikaze – this was brilliantly conceived and executed as a parody of the classic film “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” by Chris Dumas. Shot on location at several houses in Little Rock, Arkansas, including a house in the Quapaw Corner where the house’s owner loaned the band a frozen, dead bird for one scene. No, seriously. She asked us if we needed anything – like, say, a LEMONADE, and of course being a bunch of smartasses we asked if she had any dead birds laying around that we could use for a scene.

Not only did she have one, she had several deep freezes full of dead birds, all neatly categorized and labelled. We had one hour to get the shot and return it to the freezer. Now, if that wasn’t a super freaky omen of some kinds, I don’t know what else it could have been.

Rhinestones – The lead track of the album, this song featured the sound of a record scratching at the beginning. We wanted our CD (remember those old things?) to look like a vinyl album, and for the beginning and end of the album to feature that old-timey record scratching sound. Problem was, however, that our album as a weird-ass new format called AVCD (Audio Vision CD) – a format that predated DVD and was one of the first media that would let you combine video data onto a standard CD. Yes, we were pioneers with this funky format spearheaded in a collaboration between Ardent and Philips Media. And you know what happened to the pioneers. They had warning labels on their CDs that explained that playing them in some very old, rare players might cause the player to try to interpret the video data as audio data, potentially destroying their audio equipment. They were advised that if, upon inserting the CD and playing, they heard any funny scratching sounds, to eject the CD immediately and return it to the store.

See where that’s going?

The video quality here is horrible. They were shot, of course, in SD (early 1990’s, baby!) and the only copy of them I ever got was on a VHS tape that sat around for a decade before I was ever able to digitize it. It would be awesome to get the digital copy from Ardent but I don’t know if that will ever happen. There’s another full video for the song Stronger, which is quite good, but unfortunately it was not included on the tape I got, and like the other videos, they otherwise only exist as tiny postage-stamp sized (240 x 120) suuuuuper-pixelated videos embedded in the Macintosh data section of our AVCDs.

Here’s a link to a Billboard Magazine article and also the second page of it describing the release of the new format.