Boys Noize & Pilo release chaotic video for ‘Cerebral’
Boys Noize has been a busy man this week. Wednesday, he released his Hard Summer Mixtape and threw an illegal rave in the streets of Berlin. Yesterday, he kept the fire burning, with the release of the music video for his dark anthem “Cerebral,” his collaboration with techno wunderkind Pilo and the first single from Strictly Raw, Vol. 1.
The video — which premiered on Pitchfork today — evokes sensibilities of the notorious Ludovico Technique from A Clockwork Orange. Director Lil Internet splices together chaotic footage of riots, gunfire, and catastrophes, while a girl in some futuristic or alien environ watches along.
Lil Internet said the following about the video:
“I got the song, and it was dark and called ‘Cerebral.’ ‘Dark cerebral thrillers’ is the sub-genre Netflix algorithms used to recommend to me based on my viewing history, so that’s what I decided to make.”
For any Boys Noize fans who also happen to be post-modernist scholars, Lil Internet’s vision for the video also provides a social commentary based on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra:
“Google Cardboard had been recently released when I was concepting, so VR was on my mind. I also often think about theories Baudrillard posited in Simulation and Simulacra, about hyperreality and the “copy replacing the original.” Originally, the simulated world of the internet had to be colonized, so to speak, with ideas and imagery from the real world- it’s a simplification, but the flow was reality making a copy of itself in the virtual. We are beginning to see that flow reversed, where things from the simulated world of the internet are colonizing real life.”
Lil Internet hauntingly implements Baudrillard’s postulations in the character of the spectating girl — who is actually determining more of what happens in the video than she might think (effectively a reversal of the aforementioned Ludovico Technique).
“…my video concept was born- a disarmingly young looking girl uses an EEG reader to imagine these nightmarish scenes of violence and brutality, an aggregation of everything wrong in the world right now. But the flow of the simulation has been reversed, and her imagination, this simulation of violence, is actually not just a simulation after all…”
How’s that for cerebral?
Via: Pitchfork
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