The video Anthony Ruptak and Cole Naylor made for the song “PHANTASMAGORIA” is a perfect companion to the song and Ruptak’s fantastic 2025 album Tourist. It intersperses vivid scenes from a nightmare with the nightmare of everyday life in the present tense. The song has a distorted quality reflecting its raw and ragged emotions bursting from the confusion and despair of a world that seems to require resisting the status quo in which everything is, as the song’s lyrics state, a mess of our own collective making. We get through wading through a “phantasmagorical haze” while Ruptak hangs on to the old school where maybe things were rough but made more sense and maybe you could eke out a living without seeming every moment of your life taking something from you and costing you more than it ever has. The end of the video has Ruptak being buried with his hand around his mobile phone out of the grave and then bursting out with a last hurrah type of resistance to the endless wave of static and challenges only to witness the mushroom cloud that ends human life as we know it because as a species we’ve definitely let things go down the wrong path. And yet it’s a song with spirit and ultimately uplifting because that’s the tone to strike when things seem the bleakest they’ve been in our lifetimes in the modern era even for people who are already under incredibly challenging and lethal circumstances. The song challenges us to dream and do better. Watch the video for “PHANTASMAGORIA” on YouTube and follow Anthony Ruptak at the links provided.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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