Me's and Youse Variant

Less than two minutes long, this short tape makes playful and surreal use of video’s editing capabilities. Set to a sped-up version of The Band’s “The Weight” – complete with the falsetto vocals, and accelerated tempo that come with time manipulation on records – is a series of rapid, alternating washes and split-image cuts overlaying and juxtaposing the faces of the freex upon one another. Male faces and female faces fuse, the exact identity of the individuals becoming dissolving into ambiguity. The images cut back and forth too fast for the human eye to discern, and so the viewer is confronted with grinning, composite, faintly familiar yet ultimately unknowable faces. The freex themselves all seem to oscillate and meld as the constant switching back and forth between the two channels destabilizes any possibility of a singular image. All the while the overly fast folk song, turned into a cartoon parody of itself, just adds to a general feeling of zany, video experimentation – one the freex are known for.

— Nicolas Holt, 2016