Tag: bensnburner

For Its Video for “Do We Give a Damn?” bnsnburner Looks Like it Took the Extreme Tourism Route to Film in an Abandoned Chapel in Chernobyl

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bensnburner, photo courtesy the artists

bensnburner’s video for “Do We Give a Damn?” looks like it was filmed in a long disused room in Pripyat, Ukraine. The visuals like Vice followed the band to film in that forbidden place playing this music that sounds like a mix of brooding minimalism and playfulness. Between guitar, drums and synth the band weaves a sound that reaches heights of desperate, haunted quality at times, at others, a dark spaciousness. All the while, even when the song peeks from behind its dark shroud, there is a sense of menace. Like maybe the band is in denial of a band of homicidal mutants á la The Chernobyl Diaries laying in wait when they try to make their exit from the doomed city. But the song ends on such a transcendently ethereal final passage it sounds as though the band escaped the musical darkness and thus a perilous fate as well. Watch the inspired performance on YouTube and follow bensnburner at the links below.

bensnburner.com
soundcloud.com/bensnburner
youtube.com/user/bensnburner
bensnburner.bandcamp.com
facebook.com/bensnburner
instagram.com/bensnburner

The “respawn” Video Single by bensnburner is a Haunting Embodiment of the Game Concept as Manifested in Song

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bensnburner logo (cropped)

A montage of what appears to be a passing bus in reverse and then I forward motion is the backdrop of “respawn,” the first single from bensnburner’s forthcoming album. The low textural drone flowing along with a cycling background melodic drone convey a dream-like energy as guitar strikes fractured and drawn out riffing and distorted synth winds warble and whorl. It’s reminiscent of the film Koyaanisqatsi in how the music and the footage are synergistic in highlighting how mysterious and alien every day, seemingly mundane events can be unless we truly pull back and examine what it is that’s really going on if we’re able and willing to strip it of the cultural knowledge and assumptions that give them the meaning suggested and programmed by cultural context. The concept of “respawning” in a video game is to die in game and then come back to life at a beginning point and to, in a way, to start over, have another chance to approach things from another angle or to make the same fatal mistakes all over again but without the consequences of actual death. The motion of the video and the recursive structure of the song is sort of an embodiment of respawning in musical form but with the iterations evolving as one hopes one would in a game setting. Watch the video below and follow bensnburner at the links provided.

bensnburner.com
youtube.com/user/bensnburner
facebook.com/bensnburner
instagram.com/bensnburner