Avant garde musical duo Hank & Cupcakes embrace the visual spectrum
This past weekend, the Southern Brewer’s Festival hosted the unforgettable indie rock duo Hank and Cupcakes. The pair are known for delivering high-energy performances that are accented by creative stage sets and costumes.
The continuing evolution of their image and stage presence has played a major role in their popularity, and made them into one of the most memorable bands in recent music history.
When Ariel Scherbacovsky and Sagit Shir came to the United States from Israel, they had just started Hank & Cupcakes. The band was underdeveloped visually—there was no interaction between them on stage, no stage design, and no costuming. New York City was a major inspiration to them, expanding their aesthetic sensibilities and inspiring their performances.
Their music was well received, and they started playing to larger audiences. When the duo started booking festivals, they realized that they were going to look very small on a big festival stage. They wanted to have an expansive stage design that would be beautiful and give their shows a grandiose feeling.
In Ariel’s words, the set “makes the stage have our own imprint.”
The band made a practice of collaborating with artists and photographers in New York. By surrounding themselves with other talented people, they developed a series of visual languages to use in their stage designs.
“It just happened that we connected very well with people who are in the visual realm of art,” Sagit tells us. “We work a lot with a Mexican fashion photographer named Javier Ortega—he took a lot of really good photos of us, and designed the album cover for Cash 4 Gold. For the last album we did, all of the painting and stage design was painted by an amazing Mexican artist, Claudio Limon.
“We met him through Javier. We sent all of the plain white fabrics of our stage design to Claudio in Mexico, and he sent them back painted. He did the entire visual art for Cheap Thrill—the album cover and all of the contents. The actual photography was done by Anna Haas from Nashville.”
“In New York we collaborated with a very interesting photographer named Tom Sands, with whom we later did a music video,” Ariel says. “There is a constant flow of people that we work with.”
“One of the first things we did was with Alan Lugo—that led to one of our first music videos,” Sagit continues.
“There’s another guy named Matt Buckleman who did amazing work with us. We basically didn’t commission any of our music videos—they were all collaborations with artists and people that we were making art together with. “Melanie Willey is another person who has had a large impact on Hank and Cupcakes, doing art direction for our ‘Liquid Mercury’ music video. Mark Herndon and Lauren Coakley have done a lot of photography work for us in Chattanooga.”
The band’s shows are extremely camera friendly, largely because of their set and costuming. They developed their elaborate look from nothing, like an ugly duckling growing into a swan.
“I don’t think there was a specific person who inspired us, but at first we were very non-fashionable people, Sagit explains. “Everything that you see of us now, we weren’t before we came to the United States.”
“If you see some old videos of us, you will understand what we’re talking about,” chimes in Ariel.
“There was no awareness at all of a visual language,” Sagit notes. “I think that coming to New York was explosive in our minds—it was amazing. The streets of New York are very inspiring.”
“You get into the subway in New York, and you see this guy with tight pants and things stuck to his head and glowing stuff all over him—you see the most tremendous things presented to you right in the middle of the street,” Ariel elaborates. “It is very stimulating, and you get a lot of ideas that way, and you are like ‘Wow, that’s so cool, I want to do it!’—and then you take that to the stage, where you can actually do whatever you want.”
“It expands the limits that you have in your head—being in such a creative place like New York makes you understand that there are no limits, and you can really go very far with your creativity,” Sagit adds.
Speaking about her current costume, Sagit tells us, “I made a vagina dress in celebration of having a baby, creating life, and being a woman.”
Ariel keeps it simple, saying, “I just do the usual tiger leotard, nothing fancy.” After the couple finishes this tour, they’re going to take a few months off to write their next album. They have an idea for a new visual language, and Sagit is editing the new music video for “Boulevard” from the album Cheap Thrill. They also have two side projects—Starling, and Ariel’s experimental Dr. Bliss, featuring his alter-ego Max Bliss.
We can’t wait.