When Michael Milosh of Rhye had the idea to make a music video last month, he was hesitant about even presenting the idea to his team. In March, around the time that Los Angeles went under a stay-at-home order, he finished a song called “Beautiful” that he had been tinkering with in his home studio since December. For about a decade, Milosh and a rotating cast of performers have made spare and sexy R&B as Rhye, and during the pandemic, he was continuing to work.
“When I’m working on a song, it’s like the rest of the world falls away, and I’m in this weird little tiny world—it’s just me and the song that I’m working on,” Milosh said in a recent interview. “You’re in that very sacred, special place when you’re making something.” Ever since the lockdown started in Los Angeles, Milosh said, his day-to-day routine hasn’t actually changed too much. Last August, he and his partner, Geneviève Medow-Jenkins, moved from the middle of the city to a more isolated place, for the quiet and so Medow-Jenkins could become a caregiver for her father after major surgery.
“We wanted to make a video for it, but it’s full quarantine and everyone’s quite nervous about it,” Milosh said. “I didn’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable even with me asking.” But a conversation with Lisa Eaton, a choreographer he has worked with in the past, made him feel confident that with a little bit of ingenuity and some protective measures it could be done. By filming the video himself, outside on his Malibu property, and shooting a series of dancers in solo sessions, Milosh was able to make something that felt true to Rhye without disregarding the fears of the moment.
“We weren’t trying to tell a very specific story. I wanted to capture all the beautiful natural elements around our house,” Milosh said. “We just approached it with that social distancing mentality. I shot it with telephoto lenses, so I was really far away, and Lisa did this on-site choreography that was very spontaneous.”
Another advantage of the homemade approach is that Medow-Jenkins served as one of its stars. She is also his artistic collaborator and has modeled on a previous Rhye record cover, and for this video she embraced their property’s privacy and danced nude. According to Milosh, one of the biggest challenges wasn’t the unusual atmosphere on set, but making sure that the resulting video would be chaste enough for YouTube. “Part of the funniness for us was trying to make it super PG,” he said. “Then I was using all these glasses to shoot through—the lenses going through glasses so you don’t see anything. It was just approaching it with a lot of humor and having fun with everything.”
The video fits in organically with the project’s other work, despite the environment it was filmed in. Some of that has to do with Milosh’s approach to creativity. “In general, as a person, I don’t try to create an ambiance. I think I try to feed off of the natural energy that’s always there, the natural chemistry anyone has, whether it be in a musical context or a filming context or artistic context,” he said. “Each person has their thing that’s their thing that they’re bringing to the video, and I’m just trying to capture their thing, as opposed to fit them into the mold that I’m trying to create.”
Milosh said that he’s been trying to focus on creativity despite the anxious moment. For a few years, he and Medow-Jenkins have thrown an event series for ambient music called Secular Sabbath. Like many other artists, the pair eventually threw themselves into livestreaming once it became clear that their scheduled bills probably could not go forward. “Our friend has this very large property out in Joshua Tree,” he said. “So we keep going out there and doing these sunrise ambient-music sets to nobody—but they’re fun.”
Milosh said that the learning curve for figuring out the technology was tough but they were able to get a few lessons from their friend Diplo when they used his Twitch set-up to stream one Secular Sabbath. But in the weeks since the lockdown started, he has slowed down on that approach. “It was a really good immediate response to the lockdown for the first eight weeks,” he said. “Now what’s happening in my mind is that I want to evolve it into something still in that space but it’s not necessarily the confines of a livestream. I want it to be multi-camera, with more movement. We’re really thinking about it before we get back into it.”
For the “Beautiful” video, Milosh used the lockdown as an opportunity to emphasize some of the elements of his art that weren’t necessarily affected by the rapid shift in society. As the pandemic continues, it’s bringing him back to his artistic motivations. “You start to figure out what your role is in society, quote-unquote, as an artist,” he said. “I’m really interested in when art is not hyper-intellectual and, as a result, exclusive. I like when art has a warmth to it, or an emotion to it and brings people a sense of peace or calm. That’s what I’m drawn to myself in art. As a result, that’s the role I want to play in contributing whatever music and art gets put out into the world.”
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