Alexis Taylor & Mike Simonetti – I See A Darkness
Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip and producer Mike Simonetti, the Troubleman Unlimited and Italians Do It Better co-founder who’s also half of Pale Blue, have covered Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “I See A Darkness”. It comes from their collaborative EP on Smugglers Way, pairing the cover with the original “Perfect Kiss”, out on limited 12″ vinyl with remixes from claire rousay and Black Forces (the remixes get a digital release later this year).
The collaboration goes back to a chance meeting at the now-closed Williamsburg club Output, where Simonetti was DJing and Taylor was struck by his re-edits. When they started trading demos, Taylor sent an early sketch of this cover, telling Simonetti he had a house version of the song in his head. Simonetti heard something different, and the finished track came out of that pull in two directions, with Pale Blue’s Elizabeth Wight on backing vocals and Taylor looping fragments of the singing the way classic dance music treats a voice. Will Oldham released the song in 1999 as the title track of his first album under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy name, and Taylor calls it a foundational song for him; this version joins covers by Johnny Cash, Anna Calvi with Perfume Genius, and Rosalía with Refree.
The video deserves its own paragraph. Conceived by Taylor as a tribute to Samuel Beckett and directed by Ben Crook, it stages the song as a kind of televised play: Taylor and German actor David Bredin in armchairs, drinks in hand, slowly moving toward each other as the song intensifies, with Jarvis Cocker and Sian Ahern in supporting roles standing in for Simonetti and Wight. Crook shot it on vintage valve video and 16mm, scripting the lyrics into scenes and dialogue, and reads the song as an internal dialogue, a drunk man convincing himself he can change. I’ve always heard the song that way too, which is probably why the staging works so well for me: it makes the conversation literal without cheapening it.
