Meet Galen Pehrson, the Director of Death Grips' New Video

Galen Pehrson is an animator, but not the kind that you generally see on the dumber end of the Internet. That is to say, he's not in front of a computer programming GIFs - he's holed up in his LA apartment for months slaving over hand drawn figures of oddball hallucinatory landscapes, often populated by animals that owe as much to Perestroika-era Soviet animation as they do to Max Fleischer.

A few months back, Pehrson teamed with the Sacramento noise-rap terrorizers Death Grips to produce a short film called "True Vulture." The video is as gorgeous and psychedelic as you could hope for, and even features Pehrson's girlfriend Jena Malone (yeah, the Jena Malone from Donnie Darko, Contact, and The Hunger Games) as the voice of a stoned-out, Nietzsche-quoting crow. The whole shebang was done with the support of LA's Museum Of Contemporary Art - MOCA just started their very own YouTube channel: head right here to subscribe, but before you do, check out the video:

Yesterday I gave Galen a ring to chat about his creative process, his insane work ethic, and the nausea that follows extreme aerobics. My only regret is that our readers can't hear his voice, which is oddly hypnotic in a PST sort of way, and can only be described as the mid-point between Quentin Tarantino and Andy Warhol:

Noisey: Hi Galen! How are you doing?
Galen Pehrson: I’m doing good! I actually just got in from a crazy workout. My girlfriend Jena is doing this really intense training for a film and so I went with her and did these aerobic crazy exercises. I worked out until I got really nauseous, it was pretty extreme.

What a good boyfriend! You're following her workout regimen! I don't do that sort of thing for my girlfriend.
Yeah, I’m trying to get into it because I’m just working so much behind my computer, or drawing at my desk. I've got to do something to counteract that. Like this last thing I did with MOCA and Death Grips, I barely stood up at all.

How much work did you actually put into it?
I worked a lot faster than usual I did it in… let’s see, probably 12 weeks?Yeah, 12 weeks. It’s literally every moment of my life for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.

12 weeks? Oh my god.
12 weeks of at least 12 hours of work a day, minimum.The last week I slept for maybe three hours a night and worked every moment outside of that.

How did you get involved with MOCA and Death Grips?
I know Zach, Death Grips' drummer. We’ve been friends for around 10 years now. MOCA sort of came to me, but I'd been trying to find a project with Zach for a while, something visual that wasn’t a label-funded video where the goal was to promote a song. So we found MOCA and realized that’s where we could do our project the way we wanted with the goal of just being creative and not just making a commercial for a piece of music.

It's amazing to see Death Grips pushing against any sort of commercialization, constantly and consistently shitting on everyone that wants to make money off them.
They’re just really creative. They really care about making stuff, making good stuff, that’s their primary focus. And that’s my focus as well: making the best stuff possible. That’s what we do, what we’re trying to do, you know? That’s a character reading of who we are every day. It was an easy collaboration.

Well, speaking of collaboration, you had mentioned earlier that you and your girlfriend had collaborated on some exercises. It seems like you guys collaborate artistically quite a bit.
Oh yeah. She plays the voice in this piece, and we've worked together a lot.

What’s your creative process like when you’re collaborating with someone you’re involved with romantically?
We’ve sort of created a language between each us and I think that comes across in a humorous and really creative way in the work. I create a world and I also share my real world with this person so when it came down to actually getting in the studio and doing the ADR it was kind of a joke, it’s just such a part of our everyday language, so there’s very little direction once we get there.

Outside of your collabs with Jena, do you feel like you're a part of a larger scene or group?
I honestly don’t feel like I’m a part of something else. I think I identify more with music than with our directors. I feel a bit isolated in that way and in that world.

Is that a bummer?
Sometimes it is but I think it also allows me to flourish creatively because there is no other real influence in that way on me. When I'm out on these projects I’m separated form other people. That's partly because of the amount of work. It’s funny, I was actually just talking about this with Zach. The amount of work is more than the final value of the work. I think Death Grips feels the same way about their music: The amount of creativity you put into something, all of that life makes something sort of priceless. But it also takes the monetary value out of something, so then its worth nothing… but also, everything, I guess.