Premiere: Good Day RVA And Gull Join Up To Welcome Richmond’s First Snowfall Of 2025 On The Nickel Bridge
During the 2010s, Good Day RVA were a crucial part of the musical ecosystem here in Richmond. Launched in 2012 by Chris Damon, Evan Hoffman, Will Weaver, and Matt Cowan, the filming collective grew to encompass around a dozen different people, from videographers and photographers to recording engineers and set designers. They threw all-day Richmond-centric music festivals and shot music videos for a variety of local artists, but the crown jewel in their body of work was always the [LIVE] series of videos, in which they brought various Richmond musicians to historically significant locations around the city and filmed them performing one of their songs. They’d capture audio and video recordings of the performances with state of the art technology while simultaneously collecting footage of their surroundings using vintage film equipment that gave the intercut landscape shots a completely different feel. From Hollywood Cemetery to Main Street Station, from Belle Isle to the top of City Hall, Good Day RVA took the music of Richmond artists to every corner of the city.
Sadly, when the pandemic hit, it seemed to take Good Day RVA out of action. We went something like five years between videos in their [LIVE] series, and I doubt I’m the only one who resigned myself to Good Day RVA’s era having ended. Luckily for me, I was wrong — the group returned last year with a new video featuring Blush Face performing at the Tidewater locale of Sandbridge. Any fears that this would be a one-time thing can now be put to rest, because today’s premiere finds Good Day RVA returning once again, this time in the company of one-man musical phenomenon Gull, with “Sidereal Day Breaks On The Nickel Bridge.”
This video came out of a long-held ambition of co-founders Damon and Hoffman. “Chris and I have wanted to film a good day live video in a snowstorm for a long time,” said Evan Hoffman. “When we heard of the first storm of the winter, we wanted to make sure we were ready to go.” Knowing in the days after 2024 became 2025 that inclement weather was approaching, the two brainstormed for the best possible Richmond musician to work with under these conditions. They soon realized that the only choice was Gull.
“Gull was one of the first artists that captured our attention when we were beginning to form Good Day and we always wanted to make a proper live good day video featuring him,” Hoffman said. “We realized later that Gull was really the only musician or band that would have worked given the extremely cold and icy conditions.”
The Good Day collective were counting on the Nickel Bridge being shut down due to the snowy, icy conditions. That did indeed come to pass on the early morning of January 6, and the crew — which included videographers Chris Damon, Evan Hoffman, Nick Crider, Juan Mosqueda, Kate Rivara, Michael Hirsh, and Jose Martinez, along with soundman Glen Piegari — headed out onto the bridge around 6 am. “We were joined by a crew of camera people, a sound engineer, and helpers, and began filming at around 9:30 am,” said Hoffman. “Turns out this was the storm that overloaded the Richmond water facility. With the storm, the water crisis, and [the recording] falling on a day of infamy (January 6) soon after a dangerous election – we had a lot of themes to pull from when intersplicing our super 8 footage.”
Nathaniel Rappole, the musician professionally known as Gull, brought some themes of his own to the project. “I initially moved to Richmond, VA in the spring of 2007. That summer my friend Jonny Z’s body was found by the railroad tracks under the Nickel Bridge,” said Rappole. “The Richmond police and local news stated he had fallen off his bike while riding on the pedestrian path above. I remember going down there to see if I could make some kind of sense of what had happened, and left with only more questions. Since then, every time I travel across that bridge I think of Jonny and say hello with a honk of the horn or a “Yip-Yip!” over the James River.”
Jonathan Zanin, known to all within the Richmond music scene of the era as Jonny Z, was a talented artist and an excellent drummer who lent his talents to a variety of Richmond punk and hardcore bands back in the day, most famously Tigershark (why isn’t this band’s material on Bandcamp? Jay? John?) and the legendary Are You Fucking Serious!? His death broke the hearts of his many friends around the city, and was the inspiration for the long-running local art event known as Jonny Z Fest. When Good Day RVA reached out to Gull about doing this video, Rappole’s thought of Jonny Z.
“Chris Damon from Good Day RVA messaged me about doing a drum-centric song on a shutdown Nickel Bridge (due to ice and snow) Again, I thought of Jonny, who amongst his long list of attributes as a young and creative human, was a drummer,” he said.
The song Gull performs in the video, “Sidereal Day Breaks On the Nickel Bridge,” conjures up themes of life, death, nature, and the universe. “A sidereal day represents the time taken by the Earth to rotate on its axis relative to the stars, and is almost four minutes shorter than the solar day,” Rappole explained. “I often consider the importance of our heartbeats in congruence with drumming and time… Our life’s blood pumping through us like the veins of a river.”
The song is one of Gull’s more abstract, complex works, and finds Rappole seated behind an abbreviated drum kit — just a high-hat, a snare, and a makeshift kick drum — with a multi-effects processor adding loops, delay, and modulation to the simple, repeating drum pattern he plays with his bare hands. He occasionally sings wordlessly into the microphone he wears around his neck, but most of the song consists of drumming, though the sonic manipulation the beats are fed through adds atmospheric layers that at times conjure the feel of several percussionists playing at once. Mixed into the footage of Gull’s performance are clips from 8mm footage shot around the James River Park system, showing snowed-over bridges and trees thick with ice and frost, perfectly capturing the feel of a snowy winter morning in Richmond.
The Super 8 footage actually predates this video by several years. Chris Damon and Kate Rivara actually shot it during a Richmond snowstorm back in 2017. “We sat on it forever trying to find the right artist and time to use it,” Damon said. “It didn’t snow for years, and we wanted an artist performing in the snow. At first I was thinking of a solo artist, maybe someone playing softly in the snow-covered woods nearby, but when I thought of the bridge shutting down, I thought the artist needed to have a bigger sense of urgency.”
That urgency comes across in the finished video. There’s something invigorating, even inspirational, about the winter morning captured by Good Day RVA’s cameras. Hoffman hears it in Gull’s performance as well. “[It] sounds almost like a dirge or a funeral march, but also an invocation,” he said. “Like Gull is leading the march/charge for those that envision a more peaceful world – offering a glimmer of hope in our shared humanity.”
The song and this performance has deep resonance for Gull as well. “It is good to think about those who came before and what they did in their lives, because inevitably it will influence our own daily actions,” said Rappole. “Thanks Jonny.”
The video is, of course, dedicated to Jonny Z. Rest easy, old friend.
Make sure to follow Good Day RVA on social media and bookmark their website for news on their next video release. For updates on Gull, you can follow him on social media and bookmark his website as well.
