San Francisco musicians Caleb Pate and Nephi Evans have been weaving electronic and psychedelic rock as Seventeen Evergreen for more than a decade now, and their new EP Epiphanie Solaire came out this past September. They’ve just put together a dazzlingly retro video for the cover of Captain Beefheart’s “Observatory Crest”, which you can see below.
“I had been playing the original version of ‘Observatory Crest’ for a few years in my DJ sets and it became kind of a trademark,” Pate explains. “The song was imprinted on my psyche and we began learning the deceptively oblong structure of one of Captain Beefheart’s more straight forward numbers. Spiritual Pajamas’ Britt wanted to put a record out for us and the only stipulation is that we record our version of this classic. We wanted to emphasize the dreamy and evocative sci-fi aspects of the song and this is our tribute to Don. The video came out of our ongoing collaboration with Percept Visual, Brian had captured us live in the studio, with various lazers and the Atari Video Music blasting around us, which is the earliest commercial electronic music visualizer from 1976. This was juxtaposed with an apocalyptic narrative that Brian came up with and some archival science footage that we discovered searching for the ideal pairing. We hope Don Van Vliet would approve.”