Screen Testing: Dean & Britta

Meet Dean Wareham: the guitarist who founded seminal shoegaze band Galaxie 500, dream pop outfit Luna, and author of the critically acclaimed rock’n’roll memoir Black Postcards. Meet Britta Phillips: the actress, former Luna bassist and—for all you children of the 80s out there—the voice of Jem (of Holograms fame). Recording together as Dean & Britta, they’ve spent much of the last decade perfecting their own dreamy brand of pop. Today, we feature an exclusive short film of Dean & Britta directed by Debra Scherer, a writer-photographer-filmmaker who has enjoyed stints at Italian, French and American Vogue, and whose most recent project is the founding of production company The Little Squares with L’Uomo Vogue creative director Luca Stoppini. Scherer met her subjects while shooting them for Italian Vogue in late 2009, and discovered they lived across the street from her in New York’s East Village. She shot this film of the duo just as they were moving into their new place in Brooklyn early this year. “The stories that I do have these personal intimate feeling,” says Scherer, who convinced Dean & Britta to perform an impromptu set for her. The film is the first in an ongoing series directed by Scherer, who's tapped Band Of Outsiders designer Scott Sternberg for her next installment. Dean & Britta, meanwhile, are set to release their latest album next week, the result of a project that began last year, when they were commissioned by Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum to compose songs to accompany 13 of Warhol's Screen Tests (comprising 472 video portraits of the artist's favorite "superstars," made between 1964 and 1966). Dean & Britta produced a swoony mix of originals and covers to accompany these hypnotic films, which feature 60s icons such as Edie Sedgwick and Dennis Hopper; following the release of a DVD of their work in March, the musicians have been touring the songs, accompanied by large, projected versions of the artwork. (They've got further shows planned as far as 2011). Coming out July 27 from Double Feature, 13 Most Beautiful...Songs For Andy Warhol's Screen Tests is a standalone version of the project, accompanied by a second disc of remixes, an essay by Wareham and images from the Warhol films.