Meanest Dreams, Happy Birthday to the DVD This is Circumstantial Evidence, Released 4/20/04
Some pieces of art feel more like a rally cry than a “product.” Released 18 years ago today by Three One G in conjunction with Strictly Amateur Films, This is Circumstantial Evidence is a fireball moment in time captured on film, a brief flash of weird life lived vigorously, and a thing you can never go back to no matter how hard you try.
The film was a sort of State of the Nation for Three One G in the very fertile year of 2004. We are shown nine bands in the heat of life, deep-living their darkest, meanest dreams. In both live videos and videos of studio tracks, we see a prime-era Moving Units, the late and fuckin’ great Jenny Piccolo, Get Hustle, Cattle Decapitation, Swing Kids, Love Life, the legendary Orthrelm, The Locust, and The Blood Brothers killing expectations, gettin’ strange, and showing How it Was When it Was.
To watch this in 2004 felt like standing on the very top of a mountain about to explode. This was Three One G’s Decline of Western Civilization and it looks as fucked-up and sounds as sweet as it did 18 years ago.
Note: The DVD itself is long out-of-print, but you can find all the tracks here.
–Adam Gnade, author of After Tonight, Everything Will Be Different