Taken from the debut album ‘Journey Work’ released 6th May via InFiné Music
For their new single ‘Tacoma’, Brooklyn duo Bottler enlist filmmaker and 3D artist El Popo Sangre to produce a one-of-a-kind music video. Residing in France, Paulin Rogues aka El Popo Sangre is a filmmaker, 3D-animator, visual artist and one third of the creative studio Unicorn Paris, where he acts as artistic director. His darkly humorous visual imagination and narrative approach, informed by abstract theatre, science fiction and the sexual psychedelia of filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky, has taken his art across the globe, appearing at a diverse range of institutions including the Portland Museum of Modern Art, the Superchief Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, and the festival Ars Electronica.
They say: “To put it simply, Tacoma is five years worth of anxiety, heartbreak, and loss wrapped up in a seven minute existential scream. Angsty, longing vocal samples bounce and soar across a stark, driving track. A pounding, techno cavern ready kick drum punishes a pumping, subterranean bass wave. As the listener is propelled through the track, bits of beauty peek through the melancholy sky. Before the mid pause, they did their best to emulate the sound of 4 dimensional Cthulian angels and the sound of the divine on raw human ears. The piano sounds were recorded, reversed, and edited in Garage-band for iPhone and come from Phil’s childhood piano, complete with a cracked soundboard and deeply out tune. One of the most dance-floor built tracks on the album, Tacoma was born out of a longing to dissociate from those human questions that keep us up at night… Who are we? Why are we here? Does any of this matter?”
Marking an abrupt departure from Bottler’s rock and roll upbringing, Tacoma is a driving, celestial techno sound-world, constructed from heady, spiralling synth riffs, mesmeric vocal drones and sustained tension. Mirroring Bottler’s compositional approach, Rogues’ video traverses styles, references and techniques, creating a multidimensional and rich visual world.
A hallucinatory accompaniment in the form of a visual narrative, the video for Tacoma is a study of the will to know oneself and the drive to be the best form of oneself, overcoming trauma within and beyond the physical limitations of the body. Rogues’ narrative twists and weaves between parallel, abstract 3D worlds. A growing mass of naked bodies are engaged in a graceful yet bewildering sensual ritual; shapeless, cosmic life forms undulate and glitter in an arid, rocky desert; a trio of horned, demon cherubs watch voyeuristically on as a headless figure performs an incantation; on the stage of a theatre, a multi-limbed character cradles themself before rising and embarking down an extra-stellar corridor.
Like Bottler’s euphoric, perpetually rising composition, which builds from dusty, nostalgic echoes of a childhood piano, the visual narrative engages the viewer’s will for the unknown, driving mechanistically and unrelentingly into a universe both surreal and familiar, alien and intimate. As in much of Rouges’ work, actions and transformations form an introspection on identity and emotion, encased in vibrant, kaleidoscopic imagery, ritualistic motion and surrealist sexual fantasy.
Tacoma / 6th April
About Bottler:
Brooklyn-based musicians and producers Pat Butler and Phil Shore are childhood friends who developed their deep love of music together. Now formally ordained as Bottler, the duo blend a myriad of styles to create songs that emanate warmth, joy, sorrow, pain and the full spectrum of human emotion. It’s electronic music inspired by a broad range of artists, all connected by their liberated approach to production. Bold, unpretentious, raw, dynamic, and highly creative, Bottler are a formidable duo poised to ignite the dance floor with their kaleidoscopic collection of sounds.
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