“MUMMY IS A SMUGGLER”
by DUNZA
Background:
DUNZA is another James Toth pseudonym and in his own words, James describes DUNZA as a blend of “old trance loops, analog synthesizers, doom riffs, disembodied vocals, field recordings, and heavily processed samples from decrepit 4-track noise cassettes to create a kind of postmodern ambient music that owes as much to Emperor as it does Pete Namlook.”
Over email James and I had debated the potential of me doing a video for DUNZA. Frankly, I wasn’t sure how we were going to top his video for I Want To Go Down To The Basement”. How do you compete with dogs? Furthermore, how do you make an engaging music video for a 6 minute instrumental Hyperborean dubwise dream-doom track? The questions left me flummoxed. I wondered what was even the point of music videos in 2025? What does a video have to do to get people to WATCH it rather than just LISTEN to the music?
Never one to back down from a creative challenge - I decided try something that I felt was "in the spirit of DUNZA".
I started by deconstructing one of my favorite film series into micro-moments that focused less on the physical violence and more on the spiritual violence of gangster’s life. I decided to go one step further and embrace my love of audio samples. The use of audio samples from movies within popular music, has always been an obsession of mine, but something James rarely thinks of doing. Here, I decide to not muck with the sonic qualities of his music track by adding dialogue from the films, but to do so in a visual way, by pulling select subtitles from the films and re-arranging those into a conversation about the dark sorrow of the gangster life and the potential for redemption. In essence, I made a lyrics-video for a song with no discernible lyrics.*
The finished video takes as much inspiration from the culture of dub music and sampling as it does from the Situationist International, Guy Debord’s film-work, Richard Price’s photography, Sloganeering, Night Flight, and Van Halen’s video for “Right Here, Right Now”.
Released in 2025
*Jenny Pulse of Kinsella & Pulse, LLC provides the song’s vocals, but even James doesn’t know what she’s saying.