All digital and analog visual work and real life objects made by Katherine Mills Rymer and all music instrumentation, arrangement and production by Jens Bjornkjaer. Vocals sung by Katherine Mills Rymer.
The video was made in Los Angeles, filmed over three days with an Iphone 12 and constructed in our studio in January 2021. The reconstituted composition of the classic and ultra normative ballad by American song writer Chris Isaak, is re-imagined into the darker futurism and peculiar outlook and objectives of our work. Aesthetically and visually the piece is made up of various methods of construction including; video of Katherine Mills Rymer’s face, digital composite, VFX and the use of real life made miniatures and real life art objects made with clay, polyurethane and epoxy resin. The lyrics of the ballad include the central pivotal line “The world was on fire and no one can save me but you.” We interpreted this as a lament. Not of the the male crooner as the song is composed, but instead from a perspective of the inner world of one of the many women the crooner has seduced, and the wicked/evil, blazing-revenge fantasy inside the protagonists head. Our version is sung in a high soprano, the inverse of the low male alto of Chris Isaak’s original version. We aimed to subvert the original production soundscape as well. Our new production and interpretation of the song is lush and heavy, both digitally produced and with real instruments. It has a sense of sexual intent and extruded expensive saxophone and electronic low end beats. There is a sinking decrescendo and sounds of the wet leafy rain and fecund obsession. The video moves like a slow slide show of underwater remembering and hurt. With moments of surreality of lust and hopes imagined. It’s as if the female protagonist (singer) with the lines repeating in the chorus “I don’t wanna fall in love. No, I don’t want to fall in love with you,” is futile in her attempt to move on, to be ‘cool’, to not be the wicked woman of obsessional delusion that society and cliche present. A constant motif in the video is blue male eyes blinking and repeating in hypnagogic locales, a visual metaphor for the way heartbreak plays inside the head of the bereft. The long, bruising and endlessly embarrassingly soiled reality of the inner psyche of the abandoned lover. Aesthetically the view point is in macro with a slow zooming to macro focus in various slides within the video. This explores the plastic beauty of idealization and its unseen faults and vicious need. With a focus on the porcine emotional memory and impact of physical intimacy. The closeness of the visuals seeks to entice and unsettle the viewer with a power of intrusion however alien and uncertain. This video is part of the Maculate Ep 2 released in August 2021, which is the second half of the Immaculate EP 1 released in February 2021. Maculate meaning ‘spoiled or stained’ is our inverse humor, sense of absurdity and perverse outlook towards taste and purity. This work seeks to unravel good taste, while adhering to beauty however wild and uncomfortable. This works explores the idea that there is no perfection and there is no ‘filth’ or imperfection in the quixotic free space of the artist practice.
Concluding that perhaps when it comes to mortal feelings, private thoughts and longing - there is no up and there is no down.