The new music video for Lusine, like the track itself, is almost sickeningly stomach-turning, it’s so beautiful.
Director Christophe Thockler has made an epic opus. The last time we caught up with Thockler, he had set 36,000 photos of melting ice to the chilling music of Ben Neill and Mimi Goese.
This time around, we’ve gone from ice to the titular blood. And that’s lots of blood – enough to attract vampires from a couple of cities away. 5 litters of blood rush through some 15 kg of components salvaged from TVs, phones, and computers, waste turned into what the director dubs “electrorganic” material.
He isn’t just shooting stills this time – but 30 minutes of video and 7,000 photos combine to the result you see here.
Lusine – Arterial from DaBrainkilla on Vimeo.
For his part, Lusine (Jeff McIlwain) is in his usual top form, meticulous and painstaking with his attention to sound. Ghostly’s press release talks about spanning styles, but to me, Lusine’s voice overshadows any particular genre fascination. “Arterial” is pure headphone music, more introspective than the recent The Waiting Room but with the same patiently-humming grooves and Lusine fingerprints. What’s new is an especially exquisite obsessiveness about each sound, synths treated delicately with acoustic noises tucked together. It merits repeated listening, as there are so many harmonious layers of sound design. But the overall texture is McIlwain, a cover of some interior song he keeps reworking.
Really looking forward to this EP.
Lusine’s tour appearances are rare these days, so look to Missoula Montana and The Badlander on August 1 or Le Salon Daome in Montreal September 4.
Here, Thockler’s process in the video I think fits perfectly with Lusine’s approach – not just the aesthetic match, but a conceptual parallel to what the musical artist is doing. Thockler writes:
The complexity of this electronic track, mixing both cold and warm sounds, inspired me to create something I call “electrorganic” : a mix of blood and human tissues with electronic components like LEDs, screens and boards. The result is an intriguing video, where you don’t really know what’s happening, but you can imagine that some sort of electronic machine is powered by, or producing blood.
Movies and music videos from the 80s and 90s were also a source of inspiration for this video, there are some sequences that are very small tributes to audiovisual works I love like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, Coppola’s Dracula, Cameron’s Terminator, Carpenter’s The Thing, Cronenberg’s Videodrome, the music video Digging in the Dirt by Peter Gabriel…
And that synergy is another reason why this summer’s main project for CDM is joining the needless divide between Create Digital Music and Create Digital Motion, in a way that you can still focus on what you care about. More on that very soon – first an editorial explaining where we’re coming from, and then how we’ll get to where we’re going.