Reader, I can already tell that there is not enough of The Trip (not to be confused with The Trip) in your life. Not enough of that unmoored strangeness that comes about late at night, walking streets alone, imagining every other human on earth as ghostly conflagrations at the tips of your vision. I can tell this because there is never enough, everyone everywhere at every time always needs just a little more. And thus we have the new video for Sirius Blvck's "Tribe Quest" off of Light in the Attic (which is out now digitally via Rad Summer and on tape from Holy Infinite Freedom Revival).
An eyeless shadow of Blvck floats over the slowed-down walk of Oreo Jones, DMA, and--fidgeting through a Freudian split--another iteration of Sirius. When that ghost blinks, the whole image feels a shudder with microseconds of white clipped out. Then cut to Jones and Blvck both staring you down, white pits where the eyes oughta be. It's unnerving but not altogether terrifying, mostly because you can feel the humor scratching at the screen door all throughout.
Listen to tracks by Blvck, Jones, and DMA from the archive in the player above.
The song itself creeps along quietly, Sirius flips and starts around his verse, but it never ends up showy over the spare low end from Bones of Ghosts. And then Jones pops in, complete with a Blackfish reference (to which I offer a sad shout-out), lunging up and down higher, higher than Sirius' mostly chilled out rhyming. Contrast, contrast, contrast. Then, of course, closing the whole thing out is the true ghost, the one leaking out every USB port on every machine, Mr. DMA, his voice so heavily vocodered that it's a buzzing flurry of near incomprehensibility.
It all feels so taut and pulled together that it's hard for me to imagine that these are guys I see around at shows and on the street all the time. It seems like they ought to be off on some other plane, you know. But anyway, there's cameos throughout of all sorts of faces that might or might not be familiar depending on where you hang and stay. There's even a visual shout out to ours truly Musical Family Tree itself, with a lingering shot of a sweet BrainTwins styled t-shirt, and a glimpse of a conversation. That's because no matter how out on a trip you go, you always come back home at the end. The "Tribe Question" video goes long and far, but feels still rooted deep, and for that it's amazing. Respect.
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