BLACK FRIDAY

I try to make at least a couple of videos for every album as they are released.  It’s a strange experience because on the one hand, I enjoy creating them, but on the other hand, my channel in Youtube lives in a dark dusty corner that the Almighty Algorithm rarely comes anywhere near.  And this is pretty much true… well, everywhere, and for everything. It’s amazing that you’re even here reading this now, to be honest (so thank you for that, gentle reader).  Social media “musts” like Facebook do their best to keep even the people who subscribe to the page from seeing any of the posts, and it can be pretty frustrating.  So there’s on the one hand, this great outpouring of filmic enthusiasm and work, and a great joy in creating visuals outside of my own head for the music, and on the other hand, the sure knowledge that it’s probably only going to be seen by a handful of people.  Most of my “real-life” friends have no interest in what it is I do, so not even they bother to click links or watch this stuff, let alone (Gods Forbid!) do anything helpful like share them.

That’s fine, I guess.  The joy of making the things themselves is actually pretty enormous, and I wind up with these oddball visual realisations for my songs that bring me a sense of … I guess it’s accomplishment, pride in creating something, doing something only I would ever do.  At the same time, I never want it to feel stale or by-rote, so I try to approach each video with something fresh and different enough to keep the process from ever getting stale to me.  When the time came to make some “promotional videos” to try to publicise the release of Let There Be Light, I was feeling that the formats I’d already kind of fallen into were getting a little bit dull, doing the same thing I’d done before.  I wanted a challenge, and to express the feeling and theme of the album in some way that wasn’t just “some more music videos”.  

The whole idea of Let There Be Light is that the mythological expressions of human life and experience have a certain unity and continuity across civilisations and time.  Recurring symbols, concepts and themes born again and again have passed down through myriad human civilisations, either through direct contact or by springing up independently through what Jung termed the Collective Unconscious - a repository of archetypal imagery within the physiological structure of human brains as common to all humans as is the sun in the sky.  We form these into different ideologies, philosophies, and eventually codify them into religions, carving out special rules, taboos, social roles, castes, social order (and the justifications for inequality and injustice that all of this implies) together with a thousand other Important Delineations that ultimately result in decay and demise.  But the mythological impulse never dies.  It loses coherent expression and organisation, then resurrects itself in another form appropriate to the civilisation it serves, and (eventually, again) winds up with its own distinct delineations and generally a priesthood to guide it. Don’t believe me? Ask your doctor!  Ultimately however, the religions - the delineations we create - tend to prevent and obscure (in doctrine and the social mores borne of doctrine), the direct apprehension of the experiences the mythological impulse points to in the human experience of life on this planet in the first place.  What's more, they tend to obscure the understanding that ultimately, we're all expressing the same feelings, impulses and longings again and again throughout time and across civilisations.

While I know that “no one listens to albums anymore” I still like the idea of taking a musical look at all this stuff as a whole, and from the perspective of someone who’s made an avid lifelong study of it, yet who remains very much a product of these times, and of the handful of "cultures" that formed me.  Making a couple of videos in the usual way didn’t really feel like a fulfilling way of bringing something visual to this project, so I got the notion to make one huge “promo”, and to challenge myself by making a little film (with a script, complete with "bad dubbing" and everything) instead.  Spacegoat vs the Algorons is the result.  Is it a perfect mythological representation of my intentions in making the album? Of course not!  Was it fun to make? Hell yes.  Please enjoy it.