With the release date of my new EP Hi Rez Lo Life, I am glad to share not only the music video below but also some behind-the-scenes shots that we did with director/video artist/photographer/coffee god Richard Besenczi (who was also working on my previous MV Vex).

As for all the messages, thoughts and directives behind the EP, here’s something from the CD inlay to sum it up.

“Humanity’s greatest potential is a greasy burp of couch crisps and a complaint against bad CGI when an actual extraterrestrial invasion goes live on social media. From Trump through Brexit to the Anti-Encryption Bill, we have a long list of indiscernible proofs that unity has never been our race’s biggest forte, definitely not in the globalized post-internet era. The loss of both narrative and context with the added lack of interest and the ability to foresee conclusions is our primal setup for this MMORPG we play on a daily basis. This is what HI REZ LO LIFE is about, both a reminder and a warning.”

Ever since Vex was released, we knew we wanted to work together on the next Planetdamage video – and then one day I found a link to a pair of shining anime glasses made by @dekantsu and it instantly hit my brain on the spot where I store my memories about Neon Genesis Evangelion and Shinji’s dad. We both look at it and think THIS IS IT.
So Richard starts sending me notes about how funny creating this pair of glasses is, because there are quite a few ways the behind-the-lens LEDs can look bad (or not illuminating the lens perfectly) or how you have to position the cables and such but long story short – this is it! Him and his buddy Dániel Major laid some extra hours into it to create the ultimate doomsday device with the weight of cosmic sadness, no! (I mean, yay!)

And this is how it looks like – this is the photo I sent out in a haze saying LOOK LAST AIRBENDER HERE. I have actually gotten an email saying “I am really glad that you had your moment of coming out as an alien overlord.” These were the words. Definitely my next CV picture. (Definitely sabotaging the workforce industry.)
Indoors shots. We split the night up into two phases – one is indoors lipsync and a lot of other experiments that we ended up not using (and drinking a lot of coffee) and the other is outdoors and coping with the fact that having a thermos of hot drinks and an extra pair of ANYTHING. This is another set of glasses (thanks, Emke!) with a tendency of reminding you of Belgian EBM.
I am seriously not aware of what I am doing here but it could be one of those airbender moments.
And then we left and then Richard ended up talking about all the different weird statues that he’s been seeing, such as this giant snail. There were other notably bizarre statues of biological entities, fhtagn, but this is the most memorable. No funny versions, because we were already freezing. Okay, Richard wasn’t. I was.
Oh, look. An empty parking lot with neons. We would only need a helipad or three Ukrainian robo escorts with pirated non-DRM servos and half a rave to make this look more cyberpunk but in 2018 even this will do quite nicely!
Yeah, so, funny moment. When we were recording the Angst video a few years ago with the Cyberdog kaleido goggles, everyone who saw that headgear wanted to wear it right then and there… and then they realized it gives a pretty solid headache and asked so how did you see in that? Answer: I didn’t. The very same stands for this video shoot – I basically had to keep my eyes closed because of all the lights a few millimeters exactly in front of them so however I moved in those shots, those were moments of infinite divine fucking grace.
And then we ended the second phase, headed home and while I’m still stranded on a night bus, I get this image with a message that goes something like I’m not saying this could be a hiphop single based just on how you look but this totally could be a hiphop single, look! I think Richard turned this into a T-shirt design which actually looks pretty solid and brings back all the 80s EBM vibes in shades of grey and red.
And this comes a few days later, these are some of the photos Richard did from all the tricky places we stopped at for a few shots. These might end up as promo photos or you might even see a few more on this site or on Facebook. See you next week!