Tara Busch, Shattering Glass With Her Song

The cliché I remember from Marx Brothers movies is that it’s bad when a singer’s voice can break glass — but for Tara Busch, it seems to be a point of pride.

Busch’s site, Analog Suicide, devotes a fair amount of space to promoting the singer’s first album, but its real draw is the short films produced by her husband and filmmaker, Maf Lewis. Together, the pair have created a series of 20-second shorts that utilize reverse motion and other experimental techniques as an accompaniment for Busch’s lovely voice.

Not only do Lewis and Busch seem happy to just play around with various effects and styles, but they make their process behind creating these shorts transparent — this short documentary shows Busch working though the process of learning Over The Rainbow phonetically backwards. “I had a bit more trouble with some words than others — ‘Way up high’ kept coming out as ‘whey up hey,’” she admits. Knowing Busch’s techniques doesn’t make Revo the Rainbow any less impressive — quite the opposite, in fact.

Even in their more traditional shorts, such as this music video for Busch’s full cover of Over the Rainbow (featuring a sample from the Griffith Park Carousel), there’s a creative force evident that’s worth appreciating.

Many musicians who use online video as a self-promotion tool seem to see it as a means to an end — but Busch and Lewis’s films show them actually valuing the chance to play with the medium. YouTube success rarely translates into crossover appeal, but even if Busch never makes it, she sure looks like she’s having fun trying.