RÖYKSOPP at their best, I think, become cinematic and atmospheric, an abstract soundtrack, but always with a sharp sense of wit. So Nils Clauss hits just the right note in his film for “Senior Living,” finding mood and humor.
At a time when the signal-to-noise ratio for music videos is often out of control, here, the two seem made for one another. There’s always some risk of overdoing it, but Clauss manages to get comedic and musical timing down. I suspect some people might actually hate it, but then that, too, is usually the sign of a good music video. From Clauss’ description:
CONTENTed FILM’s award winning video for the track SENIOR LIVING taken from the new album SENIOR by RÖYKSOPP.
GENERO.TV: “CONTENTed’s film was an obvious winner in this category for us. There was an idea of ‘Senior Living’ and not just a piece of music to sound-bed a narrative. It was well thought out and had a real sense of the off the wall humour that can often be seen in some of Royksopp’s projects. This piece has good characterisation that you could really buy into and the narrative was enthralling from the start to the finish of the piece. It also used the city as a great set for this story to help create a style for the whole piece.”
“Nils Clauss is a German photographer and cinematographer, who has been living and working mainly in Seoul since late 2005.”
We saw Clauss’ work last summer, as he did similarly poetic shorts on his Canon 5D. Here, he takes that sense of narrative economic and builds it into a full-length music video — so it’s well worth going back and reviewing these:
One-minute Short Films on Canon 5D, Like Love Poems to Photography