We’ve teamed up with Chicago progressive jazz band The Pneumatic Transit to bring you the exclusive music video premiere for “The Meketrex Supplicant”, which comes from their brand new album Concerto for Double Moon. The video mixes antiqued performance footage with clips from classic horror films, ones that date back to the very early 20th century. It’s a smorgasbord of unsettling and surreal imagery that comes and goes with such velocity that it’s quite disorienting, which is only furthered by the music itself. It’s a wild ride, I gotta tell you!
The band explains why the video is so “horrific”, telling BD:
While we were tracking for the record there was always a ‘muted’ horror film playing in the background, ranging from Ti West’s “House of the Devil” to Craven’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” In turn, this undoubtedly influenced individual performances during improvisations. Furthermore, specific scenes in these films acted as models for musical timbre (use of effect units) and phrasing with the direct intention of decreasing ‘by rote’ performances.
Concerto for Double Moon can be picked up via Bandcamp.
Director Hallam Drury explains:
[Guitarist] Jeff Zampillo had some thematic ideas for the clip which helped steer the project initially. But rather than shoot the footage myself, I went hunting for really old films. I ended up finding the perfect fit – a collection of movies by two filmmakers called Segundo de Chomon and Georges Melies (kindly curated by Archive.org). Both de Chomon and Melies were filmmakers and illusionists working at the end of the 19th Century and in the first part of the 20th. I just loved the way they explored the phantasmagorical, using what must have been extremely creative film techniques for their time. Some of the shots in this clip date back to 1896 and it was a lot of fun watching these classic films that were the first incarnations of the horror and fantasy film genres. (Melies is credited as making the first ever horror film, in 1896).
The Pneumatic Transit online:
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