Take a fucking bite.
A long time supporter and general advocate of MSV, I am submerged with gratitude and endless love to finally see a fraternization between one of this century’s most resourceful and progressive musical posse and an effervescent, every-rising directorial artiste such as Diego Barrera. MSV’s videos have always been on the cusp of outre pop culture; many of them holding and releasing key elements that manage to perfectly portray, visually, what their music so successfully shapes: discombobulated fragmentum or ‘mindfuck music’ if you want to skip the dissertation on the technicalities of genre and styles. But where they’ve failed to garner much deserved attention lies heavily in their ostensible image and the lack of unique storytelling abilities. Their music is already transcendental and victorious in that same respect but their repeated incorporation of tripped out and often repetitive imagery falls short of delivering anything but that omnipresent hipster attitude, some pretty imagery and that typical “what the grapes did I just watch” perspective. This upsets me grievously because I really want to break down the walls of skepticism great groups like MSV face and in place open an abundantly flowing channel of appreciation by showing punters that there’s real essence glowing behind these musicians and that there’s a whole lot more to it than providing fresh drag beats for blurred out stoners and foraging art school students. Understandably, funding would have been a serious set back for these guys in their earlier stages of production and so one can really appreciate that they haven’t really been able to appropriately merge their sound with a complimentary vehicle in way of visual effects; until Diego. He seamlessly displays - and nearly completely commandeers - their musical genus by perfectly combining their foreboding sound which manages to sound similar to that of a backward dream; as if to appropriate the key elements of musical history and turn it into the non-music, where we find ourselves listening to and enjoying something that manages to stay familiar but ultimately confounds us, with an equally deviant but comprehensive narrative which leads us to a meaning. A resolution. Barrera shares a link and not only a link but rather a mutual understanding which can be spread across (now) numerous demographics of what this otherwise commonly rejected, albeit misunderstood, sound and league of art has been attempting to inflect: a symbiosis. It’s amazing how flawlessly he can show something so violently grappling and essentially ominous and somehow magically make it seem dainty and beautiful. This is achieved through his uses of blue tones and softer, soothing surroundings and movements as well as his sensible use of natural settings and therefore engaging analogies between the towering, empowering zealous beauty of nature and those of human societies and notably, their notorious quest for such. In a very intrinsic sense, Barrera shows a popular juxtaposition of the two sexes and touches on a regimented Adam and Eve angle. But interestingly here he goes beyond the traditional and instead of emphatically emphasizing the battle of the sexes and the betrayal on Eve spurred by Adam. Also by removing the stigma of Satan and the fruit and refreshingly supplementing it with a crux with a modern spin: to obtain and hold the fruits of such beauty, perfection, to be it, the two sexes must unify and work in harmony. A new sub-specifies has to be created in order to survive and in order to attain that crisp, glossy life-force that dangles precariously tempting us all. Purity. What lingers and illustrates most robustly in the motifs and delivery of his work is the message that human nature has close to superseded itself by getting to a point in today’s society where not only androgyny is advocated and celebrated along with the breaking down of sexual barriers and forced self-identifying, but we are now playing with our gender roles and re-moulding them into a hybrid like human entity, one which hopes to embody the greatest parts of man and the greatest parts of woman. Which can then be seen as a solution to a magnitude of altruistic problems that mankind faces today as milestones are being turned in equality, acceptance and self-empowerment. It really succeeds in re-directing our attention beyond the obvious aesthetic; an ideal, a dream, an industry that has started to seem baseless in our age of neo-recycling and self-fulfilling prophecies.
Living in an a world governed by fame and breathless beauties, our genetically engineered perfections are no longer satisfying our hungers and quests for absolutism. What once were dopey predictions and crazy hypotheses about our era and the state of today (lifestyles, technologies and opportunities that should be blowing us away) are concreting us in boredom and a lack of purpose. It’s almost as if things have become far too easy for us or far too versatile and like Sartre famously said, we really are condemned to be free, after all. Thankfully this masterpiece of food and thought reaches inside us and urges us to focus on getting back to nature and embracing our inherently immortal animalisms in a hope to go back and make some crucial changes for a vexing, improved, supersonic future. What poked out at me, like Lady Gaga’s self-proclaimed surrealist mole, was how interesting it was to see the protagonist female element lament her dominance and smugly so - her ability to hold the apple without breaking it thus proving her match of feminine gentility and soft nature with that of the purity apple. This of course is opposed to the bumbling male element who even through practices of deep thought and meditation is still no match for his lady counterpart who in this 3.33 minute epitomizing fabrication of the Adam and Eve shtick cunningly works it all out and pays no mind to the warnings of unfriendly gloating. I guess it joins a lot of dots really. It also sends a solid live wire down the vertebrate of this universal bullying pandemic that’s really beating us to a bruised purple pulp. It creatively says “violence gets you no place” or “violence is a trans-fat” in the face of the victorious, more amicable spirit who gets to munch back apples. And everybody knows an apple a day keeps the devil at bay. There’s just such an elongated and elaborate reservoir of distinguished, fine ideas and messages in such a compacted offering in this video.
But somehow I still happen to feel like that poor fat kid from Matilda who had a burning penchant for cake but was deprived of cake on too many a level and then publicly desecrated and humiliated for said penchant for cake. If only there were more cake! If only the whole world could love to learn to love cake some more and throw those jaded inhibitions out the window! And now I feel like I’m asking too much. Because people would get fat, lethargic and their back fat will blame me eternally and I’ll have a screaming, pitchfork wielding angry hoard o’ humans to wind down. In case you haven’t noticed, the cake is an allegory for the brilliant convergence of MSV’s sonic style and Barrera’s infinite genius. It’s not a metaphor for me being tempted away from the apple so much as it is the former, however, it is a juicy opinion formed from years of being a social misfit, then transgressing to suddenly, unwillingly being typecast as cool, artistic, hipster, different, creative, progressive (there’s a bevy, trust me) but still in possession of the understanding of the science and philosophies of the pop culture realms. Maybe I love these guys too much to want to see them torn apart and micro-managed by silicon valley or vapidly consumed and enjoyed by people who don’t really get it and instead are merely members of the heard; brainlessly chewing some popular turf.
Maybe this is part review on the Mater Suspiria Vision music video release of their titled track ‘Seduction Of The Armageddon Witches’; centrally, a coincidental integration to writing a review on how clever, delicate and metaphysically talented Diego Barrera is; finally, part essay on the turn of human behavior as expressed through art centralized modernist lenses and a view on man’s animalistic psyche vs. a vastly superficial, character dominated fairyland of Karl Lagerfeld and moleskins and Internet and popularity and blogging and fame and riches and bitches and Apple and an apple. Nature. Naturalist vs. bionic evolution. Perfection and purification vs. the children of the naughties’ new world. Apple Co. and a fucking apple.
Either way, it’s all delicious baby.
