Former Sonic Youth guitarist and co-founder Lee Ranaldo and Spanish recording artist Raül Refree have released a new tack and music video from their upcoming album Names of North End Women, out via Mute on February 21st. This new track and video are titled “Words Out of The Haze” and it features some visuals which originally appeared in Oscar Fischinger’s 1938 animation, An Optical Poem.
The video opens up with a title screen for the poem stating “To most of us music suggests definite mental images of form and colour. The picture you are to see is a novel scientific experiment – its object is to convey these mental images in visual form.” It then cuts to an image of a forest, a tape player, and lightning before cutting into various geometric shapes.
The song begins as a dark experimental track, with brooding vocals reminiscent of early post-punk singers abstract bass, and various bell sounds. An acoustic guitar comes out in the latter half of the track, and helps the song fade out into an ambient sound.
“The images are astounding in their rhythm and color, and we are happy to re-present them in a new context for this video,” Ranaldo explained in a press release. “Continuing the theme of re-purposing images from earlier experimental film (as also seen in the Names of North End Women video), the intent was to find interesting visual images to compliment, without illustrating, the song.”
Check out our review of Ranaldo’s collaborative album with Jim Jarmusch, Marc Urselli and Balázs Pándi and The Callas.
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