New York, NY (Top40 Charts) "The video is a love letter to the rave in a time of masks and isolation. We miss you, Rave," says NYC-based Michael Tapper of indie electro pop project Practice about his new video "I Don't Need Love." The playful, tongue-in-cheek song, premiered via Under The Radar last month, is off his debut solo album Not A Game (which will be released on February 19, 2021).
Tapper (formerly a drummer for indie faves We Are Scientists, Bishop Allen, Fool's Gold and Yellow Ostrich) is embracing a DIY aesthetic and striking out on his own with Practice, taking on the duties of songwriting, arranging, producing, recording, mixing, and videomaking himself. The "I Don't Need Love" video is no exception. To make the video, Tapper asked a few of his friends to come over and dance and then he edited the video to make it look like everyone was together. He says the masks in the video are not only a reference to the pandemic but also partly about persona and authenticity, or the lack thereof. "Who is the real you in this age of performative living, so to speak? Masks behind masks behind masks, etc." The colorful masks were made by Ada Roth, an artist and musician, and she graciously let Tapper and his crew wear them in the video as well as dancing in it herself.
The song itself was the final addition to the album, written with early
Chicago house music in mind, "opting for thick bass grooves, dance rhythms, and minimal, distorted vocals," Tapper says. "The initial idea for the song came one night when a friend was talking about how she wasn't on social media, and he said it would be funny for the chorus of a song to say, 'I don't need love,' and then at the end of it say, 'I just need Likes.' She said I should write that song. So the next day, I did."
The "I Don't Need Love" video follows the release of the audio and previous singles "Failure of Imagination," "I Saw Love," and the first single/video off the album "The Afterlife," released back in August 2020.
The first time Tapper had earnestly started working on a solo project was in 2013, after returning home from a 28-day sailing trip starting in Mexico and ending in Hawaii. Around the same time, he was also delving more into synthesizers, repairing old Juno 106's and immersing himself in '70s electronic music. Towards the end of the album creation process, when he was making "I Don't Need Love", he was listening to a lot of early
Chicago house music like Mr. Fingers and '80s Trax records stuff and wanted to try making something in that vein. "When I first started conceptualizing how I could perform Practice songs live, I had gotten this analog clone of a Roland 303 bass synth because you could program in basslines and switch between them on the fly. It turned out to be too unwieldy for me, so I had put it aside for a long while, but when I read the story of how Phuture came up with that squelchy acid house sound by tweaking the cutoff and resonance knobs on a 303 and wanted to try it. I ended up really getting into it and used it all over the record."
