Amanda Palmer - Want It Back

 #Amanda Palmer #ex-The Dresden Dolls #alternative rock #dark cabaret #dark folk #punk cabaret #singer-songwriter #music video

Last month it was announced that self-styled "punk cabaret" performer Amanda Palmer had managed to raise $1.2 million through crowd-sourcing site Kickstarter, with nearly 25,000 fans donating money to fund her forthcoming album Theatre Is Evil. To celebrate, she performed in a car park in Brooklyn wearing a dress made out of balloons, encouraging any of her fans with pins to come forward and slowly burst each balloon until she was left completely naked.
There's probably a metaphor in there somewhere relating to the open relationship Palmer has with her fans, but it also displays her willingness to bare all for her art. This feeling of being comfortable in her own skin can be seen in the stop-motion video for the excellent Want It Back, in which the lyrics to the song are scrawled on her body (bed sheets, walls and iPad). Talking about the making of the video, Palmer says: "I'm so comfortable being naked at this point that I almost forget. I’m also proud that that video has nudity, but it isn't sexual or erotic. it's using the body as a raw canvas, which I love."
Filmed by Australian director Jim Batt, it's a brilliantly intimate and anarchic representation of the song, the line "it doesn't matter if you want it back, you've given it away" made even more open and honest. Mind you, it could also refer to her no-refunds policy for fans who donated money.  From: https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2012/jul/09/amanda-palmer-want-it-back-video

This Friday, Amanda Palmer — the boob-showing, armpit-hair-wearing, theatre-loving cabaret-rock misfit who might be reinventing the music industry one tweet at a time — is coming to play a show in San Francisco. It's sold-the-fuck-out, of course (you can catch her again Sept. 26 at the Fillmore) but that shouldn't at all diminish your enjoyment of her excellent (and, coincidentally, NSFW) new video for “Want it Back.”
Here again we get Amanda in the nude, but not to especially erotic ends. Rather, her skin becomes a canvas for the beautifully scrawled lyrics of the song, which race over her chest, around her body, then down her leg and off to the walls of the room, someone's iPad, and a bunch of other places before returning to from whence they came, as Amanda herself turns black with ink. The concept is simple but totally arresting, with the type of the writing (and even some words) changing throughout, and the he whole thing working in a kind of bewildering stop-motion courtesy of editor/producer/director Jim Batt. Musically, Palmer's band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, is in full-on piano-rock mode, with a meaty arrangement of agile, ear-friendly pop. Palmer's voice is always a bit more growly than we remember; she's distinctive and evocative and powerful, although not sweet. All in all this is top-notch stuff — definitely worth that million-dollar Kickstarter campaign.  From: https://www.sfweekly.com/music/amanda-palmers-nsfw-want-it-back-video-the-naked-truth-is-not-necessarily-sexy/article_e89b909a-6068-5e4a-bbd3-2945de572db7.html

Rasputina - Cross Walk

 

 

#Rasputina #alternative/indie rock #cello rock #chamber rock #gothic rock #dark cabaret

Pioneers in the use of cello as the sole instrument within a rock band, Rasputina has been inspiring young string players to commit a number of musical sins since 1996. The group's concept was written as a manifesto, and manifested accordingly by directress Melora Creager as a wily subterfuge for a plot to open audiences to adventure. The funny, the sad, the heavy, the tender - it can all exist together. Employing elaborate costuming spanning a number of historical periods, Rasputina brings marginalized historical female figures and stories to light in the pop form, using archetypal characters such as Indian princesses, Hawaiian handmaidens and Medieval queens. Melora last performed in Europe with Nirvana, on their final tour in 1994. Over the years, Rasputina has performed/recorded with Marilyn Manson, Porno For Pyros, Cheap Trick, Goo Goo Dolls and many others. Hardened road-dogs, and with more than 7 albums under their belt, Rasputina continues to amaze and amuse.

MELORA CREAGER - voice, cello, banjo - Kansas born and raised, she moved to NYC in the 1980’s. Melora received classical music training as a child, but her performance career began with rock bands and East Village drag/performance artists. She founded the alternative/historical cello ensemble Rasputina in 1991 as a way to meet like-minded girls - girls that wanted to rock out on the cello and wear fine costumery. The sound and visual concepts that began in Creager's Rasputina manifestos presaged and influenced movements and trends such as Modern Victorians, Steampunk, freak-folk, corsetry, and crafting. In 19 recordings, and countless public performances, Creager has led a 20 year exploration in cello amplification, recording, and performance.

LUIS MOJICA - piano, beat-boxing - Luis uses the piano to cast wild narrative spells. His eyes are that of an androgynous monk with rainbow tentacles. Luis loops words, chants, and sounds through a loop pedal AKA beatboxing, ‘Beat-Boxing Baroque’. Luis brings his musical madness to Rasputina today.

CARPELLA PARVO - cello, voice - Cello-fingers in flight and with the voice of a bird, Carpella is from another country, but keeps it a secret which one. She played on Rasputina's debut album, Thanks for the Ether (1996), then succumbed to the very condition from which she takes her name - carpal tunnel syndrome. Having healed over 20 years, Carpella jubilantly returns to Rasputina in the 21st century. From: https://first-avenue.com/performer/rasputina/

Swans - You Know Nothing

 #Swans #Michael Gira #Jarboe #experimental rock #post-rock #noise rock #industrial #no-wave #neofolk #industrial rock #gothic rock #dark folk #apocalyptic folk

In a half-decade span beginning in the mid '80s, Swans swiftly transformed from bone-crushing no wave brutalists to God-fearing gothic rockers, and then to featherweight neo-folkies. White Light from the Mouth of Infinity and Love of Life, originally released in 1991 and 1992, respectively, marked the end of that metamorphosis, as the band settled into a sound at once songful and vast, luminous as a glass menagerie and forceful as a falling anvil. The two albums have long been treated as minor works in Swans' discography: out of print for years, they were cherry-picked (alongside selections from 1989's major-label fiasco The Burning World and the Gira/Jarboe side project the World of Skin) for 1999's inauspiciously titled Various Failures 1988-1992. "I'm ambivalent about much of it, but then what do I know?" Gira has written of the music on that anthology. "Some of it is genuinely good I think. Anyway, I was learning how to write a song as I went."
It's true that the period marked a shift from pummeling mantras to something more "musical," with singing instead of shouting and cascading chords instead of just drop-tuned gut-punches. That said, even here, Gira's concept of "songwriting" remains idiosyncratic: there's little in the way of verse/chorus structures, mainly just mantra-like incantations and chords wreathed around gleaming pedal tones surrounded by wide-open expanse. Drummers Anton Fier (White Light) and Vincent Signorelli and Ted Parson (Love of Life) lay into their snares with military gusto, driving the music forward in surging tattoos, and their nonstop rattle contributes to a sensation of overwhelming excess. Close your eyes, and you can practically see the sounds exploding like fireworks against the darkness of your lids.
The textures and tone colors are well suited to Gira's favorite themes, like love, death, and the sublime. Where early Swans lyrics were notable largely for their grueling power dynamics and limitless abjection—see "Raping a Slave", "Filth", "Cop", etc.—here Gira explores a more nuanced perspective. It's hardly all kittens and rainbows; both albums are littered with ugliness, from the dirge-like "Better Than You" ("So glad I'm better than you," he sings, in the world's most dead-eyed Dear John letter) to the claustrophobic "Amnesia", where he tells us "sex is a void filled with plastic" and "everything human's necessarily wrong." Gira has rarely wallowed as beautifully as he does on "Failure", one of the great nadirs—in the best way possible—of the band's catalog. Over bluesy acoustic guitar and frigid digital synthesizers, his preacher's drawl drips like blood from a stone; it would be hard to imagine a voice with more gravitas. But Gira has never met a dichotomy he could resist—he eats love and hate, sprinkled with a bit of good and evil, for breakfast—and here we can see the pendulum beginning to tip from darkness back to daylight.  From: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21259-white-light-from-the-mouth-of-infinity-love-of-life/

Bridge City Sinners - Unholy Hymns

#Bridge City Sinners #alternative folk #jazz rock #folk rock #dark folk #Appalachian folk #folk-punk #death folk #retro jazz rock #Americana #music video

This is not your Grandparents’ folk music. The Bridge City Sinners take folk songs in the direction of a punk rocker. A rowdy folksy mosaic of banjo, violin, guitar, mandolin, upright bass, and ukulele. The Sinners started their journey as a rotating cast of friends in 2016 who just wanted to play music on the streets “busk” in Portland, Oregon. They have transitioned into a powerful force playing festivals such as Vans Warped Tour, NW String Summit, The Fest, and The Seattle Folklife Festival. Before the Bridge City Sinners, lead singer Libby Lux and upright bass player Scott Michaud infrequently started playing music together on the streets of Portland, Oregon over eight years ago. Without rehearsal, nor a plan, a few times a year they would meet up with other various street musicians to sing and yell at passers-by. Years before that, on their separate journeys, they traveled, hitch-hiked, and howled at the moon across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. In hobo fashion, they earned what they’d eat and roofs over their heads by the papers and coins tossed into their hat. Through their years of wandering, they were able to pick up a rich catalog of songs passed through the traveling/busking community. In 2012, their mutual best friend and lead singer of folk-punk band Profane Sass, passed away when he fell off a train in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In a way the Bridge City Sinners are a homage to keep his spirit alive and continue passing along the music they all sang together on the streets, hidden in trains, and in living rooms across the continent. They formed the Bridge City Sinners in the Winter of 2016.  From: https://www.cactusclubmilwaukee.com/artists/bridge-city-sinners/

Dead Can Dance - Children Of The Sun

 #Dead Can Dance #Lisa Gerrard #Brendan Perry #neoclassical #darkwave #world music #ambient pop #art rock #avant garde #gothic rock #worldbeat #neo-medieval

Dead Can Dance have been included in a wide variety of musical subgenres within rock. Due to their name, image, and electronic-drum-driven ethereal sound, many defined the band as part of the dark, gothic style when they began to achieve notice in the early 1980s. Indeed, the media have called the work of Dead Can Dance everything from “world music” to “unclassifiable.” Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard, the core of Dead Can Dance, have said their creations come from pure inspiration. “No two people ever make the same music naturally, not if they’re really honest with their music,” Perry told Ann Marie Aubin in Strobe. “What we try to do is draw very deep inside us, in regions that are normally connected with the subconscious - a willful immersion in trance-like states and improvisation, then bring down a whole gamut of influences we don’t really have conscious control over.” Perry and Gerrard met in 1980 in Melbourne, Australia. They decided to name their project Dead Can Dance after a ritual mask from New Guinea. “The mask, though once a living part of a tree, is dead,” Perry explained. “Nevertheless, it has, through the artistry of its maker, been imbued with a life force of its own.”  From: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/dead-can-dance 

Dead Can Dance combine elements of European folk music - particularly music from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance - with ambient pop and worldbeat flourishes, touching on everything from Gaelic folk and Gregorian chant to avant-garde pop and darkwave. Originating in Australia, the group relocated to London in the early 1980s and signed with 4AD, for which they released a string of acclaimed albums, including the popular 1991 compilation A Passage in Time, which introduced the project's distinctive medieval art-pop to the United States before ceasing operations in 1998. They reunited in 2005 for a short tour, and officially re-formed in 2012 and issued their 12th studio LP, Anastasis, with Dionysus arriving six years later. Over the course of their career, Dead Can Dance have featured a multitude of members, but two musicians have remained at the core of the band - guitarist Brendan Perry and vocalist Lisa Gerrard. Perry had previously been the lead vocalist and bassist for the Australian-based punk band the Scavengers, a group that was never able to land a recording contract. In 1979, the band changed its name to the Marching Girls, but still wasn't able to get a contract. The following year, Perry left the group and began experimenting with electronic music, particularly tape loops and rhythms. In 1981, Perry formed Dead Can Dance with Lisa Gerrard, Paul Erikson, and Simon Monroe. By 1982, Perry and Gerrard decided to relocate to London; Erikson and Monroe decided to stay in Australia. Within a year, Dead Can Dance had signed a record deal with 4AD. In the spring of 1984, they released their eponymous debut album, comprised of songs the pair had written in the previous four years. By the end of the year, the group had contributed two tracks to It'll End in Tears, the first album by This Mortal Coil, and had released an EP called Garden of the Arcane Delights. In 1985, Dead Can Dance released their second album, Spleen and Ideal. The album helped build their European cult following, peaking at number two on the U.K. indie charts. For the next two years, Dead Can Dance were relatively quiet, releasing only two new songs in 1986, both which appeared on the 4AD compilation Lonely Is an Eyesore. Within the Realm of a Dying Sun, the group's third album, appeared in 1986. In 1988, the band released its fourth album, The Serpent's Egg, and wrote the score for the Agustí Villaronga film El Niño de la Luna, which also featured Lisa Gerrard in her acting debut.  From: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/dead-can-dance-mn0000225948/biography  

Amanda Palmer - Leeds United

 #Amanda Palmer #ex-The Dresden Dolls #alternative rock #dark cabaret #dark folk #punk cabaret #singer-songwriter 

According to Palmer, this song was inspired by a real-life incident. “I had been dating this guy from Leeds, Ricky Wilson from the Kaiser Chiefs, and we had a totally brief flash-in-the-pan fling. We had a really great time together. I really liked him, and I went up to his house in Leeds for a week. He gave me this great Leeds United jersey, which I prized. And then when I got back on tour a couple of days later I wore it on stage. I had a bra underneath, so I took off the jersey and finished the encore all sweaty and stuff. I went back to look for it, the stage was being cleaned, and it was like, ‘Fuck! Where’s my shirt!?’ I had that shirt for all of about 5 days. I’d already gotten all excited and sentimental about it, and then it vanished.”  From: https://genius.com/Amanda-palmer-leeds-united-lyrics

Tone Deaf:  You had your new album come out last year — how has the response been since it’s came out? You also had 15,000 supporters for it. It must have been amazing to have so many people put their faith, their money, and their trust in you for a record.

AP: It’s been amazing. It’s actually less hectic than having major label. You know, with your creativity and your soul and time and own vice-grip, I think it’s a lot easier, but then again I’ve played on both sides of that field and it’s a cost benefit in both departments. Being crowd funded by 15,000 people has its own set of tasks, responsibilities, drawbacks, but I would choose every single one of them one hundred times over the drawbacks of being at the mercy of profit driven major labels.

Tone Deaf: When you do release an album in that sense, is it hard to gauge how successful it’s been?

AP: That’s a really good and complicated question. What I have found is that it’s hard to gauge success, period. Even in the heyday of the Dresden Dolls, success was so slippery and impossible to define. The label defined it one way, we defined it a completely different way. If 20 years of releasing music and touring has taught me anything, it’s that I have to creatively manufacture my own definition of success. It’s definitely not streaming number. It’s definitely not money. It definitely isn’t whether or not magazine X gave me a five-star review, because all of those things have and haven’t been true in certain parts of my career, and have actually no bearing on whether or not a project was successful. I have to say that my ultimate definition of success has a lot more to do with the concrete emotional impact I can see the work having on people when I tour it and when I put it out than it does with whether or not the media weighs in or whether or not something is in the charts.

Tone Deaf: If you look at chart positions, there’s so many variations between so many artists. But then when you see you play live, your fans are so dedicated, and clearly that’s a good gauge of success if it resonates with the people, and you see that they’re enjoying it.

AP: Well that in itself is a slippery slope, because how many people need to be in that room for you to be able to call it successful? I mean, I have gotten to the point as an artist where I think I’ve fine-tuned my ability to the point to where I could bust out that ukulele, and I could play a song for you that would move you, and that’s the only thing I did this year, and I could still call it a successful endeavour, because I connected with, and affected somebody. I think we’ve just been fed the Kool-Aid for so long that scale is everything and blockbuster hits are everything, and success is upsized that we forget as artists that our role doesn’t have to do with size and scale. And we need to start flushing that Kool-Aid out of our system.

From: https://tonedeaf.thebrag.com/amanda-palmer-interview-2020/list/check-out-amanda-palmers-do-it-with-a-rockstar/

Amanda MacKinnon Gaiman Palmer (also known as Amanda Fucking Palmer, born April 30, 1976) is an American singer, songwriter, pianist, storyteller, writer and ukulele player. She's most famous for her work as part of the Brechtian punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls, along with drummer Brian Viglione. They released three studio albums and toured as openers for Panic! at the Disco, until they went on hiatus in 2008. Although Viglione and her have done shows together since then, the band has officially broken up, even though Palmer has announced plans for them to produce music again.
In 2012, Palmer famously released an album with her at-the-time band The Grand Theft Orchestra called Theatre is Evil, which was funded entirely over Kickstarter - a groundbreaking artistic decision at the time, which was worth it, as the Kickstarter far overpassed its goal. She released the album for free through her website, and then debuted on the Billboard top 100 Album list at number 10 due to the immense number of Kickstarter pre-orders.
Her songs vary wildly in style and topics, with many featuring dark humor and subject material. She's fond of recontextualizing children's songs in a more mature, adult way, and of making puns. Amanda's also known for performing covers of whatever she feels like, ranging from an entire EP of Radiohead covers on the ukulele, to classic musicals, to Black Sabbath, to Britney Spears, to a reimagining of Rebecca Black's song "Friday" from the perspective of a truck-stop prostitute.
In 2019, seven years after her last studio record, Palmer released There Will Be No Intermission, a far more serious, stripped-down album mostly just featuring her on a piano. It tackles subjects like abortion, death, depression, loss, and the climate crisis, and was released to massive critical acclaim. The world tour accompanying it featured only her at a piano, telling the most intimate and human stories of her life. Concerts often went for up to four hours.  From: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Music/AmandaPalmer

Chelsea Wolfe - Carrion Flowers

 #Chelsea Wolfe #dark folk #gothic rock #experimental rock #noise rock #ethereal wave #industrial #doom metal #black metal #electronic #singer-songwriter #music video

“What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can opener in his hand, wondering where to begin—to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it.”
– Henry Miller
Digging beneath the mess of the world to find the beauty underneath is perhaps the most consistent theme in Chelsea Wolfe’s expansive discography—a theme that ties together her ceaseless explorations in unorthodox textures, haunting melodies, and mining the grandeur embedded within ugliness and pain. With her sixth official album Hiss Spun, Wolfe adopts Miller’s quest to become empowered by embracing the mess of the self, to control the tumult of the soul in hopes of reigning in the chaos of the world around us. “I wanted to write some sort of escapist music; songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free,” Wolfe says of the album before extrapolating on the broader scope of her new collection of songs. “You’re just bombarded with constant bad news, people getting fucked over and killed for shitty reasons or for no reason at all, and it seems like the world has been in tears for months, and then you remember it’s been fucked for a long time, it’s been fucked since the beginning. It’s overwhelming and I have to write about it.”
Hiss Spun was recorded by Kurt Ballou in Salem, Massachusetts at the tail end of winter 2017 against a backdrop of deathly quiet snow-blanketed streets and the hissing radiators of warm interiors. While past albums operated on the intimacy of stripped-down folk music (The Grime and the Glow, Unknown Rooms), or the throbbing pulse of supplemental electronics (Pain Is Beauty, Abyss), Wolfe’s latest offering wrings its exquisiteness out of a palette of groaning bass, pounding drums, and crunching distortion. It’s an album that inadvertently drew part of its aura from the cold white of the New England winter, though the flesh-and-bone of the material was culled from upheavals in Wolfe’s personal life, and coming to terms with years of vulnerability, anger, self-destruction, and dark family history. Aside from adding low-end heft with gratuitous slabs of fuzz bass, longtime collaborator Ben Chisholm contributed harrowing swaths of sound collages from sources surrounding the artist and her band in recent years - the rumble of street construction at a tour stop in Prague, the howl of a coyote outside Wolfe’s rural house in California, the scrape of machinery on the floor of a warehouse at a down-and-out friend’s workplace. Music is rendered out of dissonance - bomb blasts from the Enola Gay, the shriek of primates, the fluttering pages of a Walt Whitman book are manipulated and seamlessly integrated into the feral and forlorn songs of Hiss Spun.  From: https://chelseawolfe.net/bio/

Nine Inch Nails - Broken

#Nine Inch Nails #Trent Reznor #industrial #alternative rock #electronic rock #industrial rock #industrial metal #ambient #transgressive #banned music video

Nine Inch Nails’ Broken (also known as The Broken Movie) is a 1993 short film featuring four music videos from the Broken EP with wrap-around segments shot in the style of an amateur snuff film. The extremely graphic film was directed by Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle, Coil, and Hipgnosis design group fame. The NSFW video has never seen an official release (perhaps because no label would want to put their name on it?) and has to this day been a difficult piece to track down. The terrifying, violent, and unforgettable film was originally “leaked” by Trent Reznor himself via hand-dubbed VHS tapes in the ‘90s. The original tapes were given by Reznor to various friends with video dropouts at certain points so he could know who redistributed any copies that might surface. Reznor later implied in a comment on the Nine Inch Nails website that Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers was responsible for the most prominent leak of the original tape. In 2006 and 2013 the film was briefly “leaked” to the Internet, many believe by Reznor himself. In both cases, the film disappeared quickly. In the case of the 2013 “leak,” the entire video was made available for streaming on Vimeo via the Nine Inch Nails Tumblr account, but was removed by Vimeo almost immediately.  From: https://dangerousminds.net/comments/broken_nine_inch_nails_infamous_unreleased_snuff_film_now_online_nsfw_watch

 

Swans - Better Than You

 #Swans #Michael Gira #Jarboe #experimental rock #post-rock #noise rock #industrial #no-wave #neofolk #industrial rock #gothic rock #dark folk #apocalyptic folk 

Swans is an American experimental rock band formed in 1982 by singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gira. One of the few acts to emerge from the New York City-based no-wave scene and stay intact into the next decade, Swans have become recognized for an ever-changing sound, exploring genres such as noise rock, post-punk, industrial and post-rock. Initially, their music was known for its sonic brutality and misanthropic lyrics. Following the addition of singer, songwriter and keyboardist Jarboe in 1986, Swans began to incorporate melody and intricacy into their music. Jarboe remained the band's only constant member except Gira and semi-constant guitarist Norman Westberg until their dissolution in 1997. In 2010, Gira re-formed the band without Jarboe, establishing a stable lineup of musicians which has toured worldwide and released four albums to critical acclaim. This iteration of the group performed its last shows in November 2017, ending the tour in support of its final album The Glowing Man. Since 2019, Gira has been touring and recording with Swans as "a revolving cast of contributors". Since 1990, all Swans records have been released through Gira's own label, Young God Records.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swans_(band) 

Sopor Aeternus - Sleep

 #Sopor Aeternus #Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows #Anna-Varney Cantodea #neoclassical #darkwave #dark folk #neo-medieval #neo-baroque #gothic rock #electronic #industrial #occult #performance art #music video

Officially founded in 1989, the German based Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows is one of the last of the very few dark groups/projects in Europe (in fact, on this planet), who have based the sacred trinity of their music, poetry and visual appearance on the explicit emphasis of the highly individual expression of pain, isolation, depression, token suicides and the desperate search for the “sacred reunion”; all conceived and acted out by Sopor’s sole protagonist - the transgendered and utterly beautiful Goddess (and likewise tragically Butoh-esque creature) Anna-Varney Cantodea. Perhaps best described as “introverted exhibitionism”, the holistic concept of Anna-Varney ‘s ritualistic/Jungian art is not necessarily rooted in the grounds of a commonly accepted sense of aesthetics - which is one of the many aspects that gives his/her work its serious and most unique character. Though the music playfully fuses elements of classical, baroque, medieval, and even electronic music, the essence of Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows always remains entirely “gothic”. Despite the fact that to this very day Anna-Varney still refuses to perform her magic(k)al work live in front of a human audience, Sopor Aeternus & The Ensemble Of Shadows have long gathered cult status in underground circles worldwide. Strongly recommended to be approached only with an open heart and mind, the profound darkness (and occasionally subversive humour) of Anna-Varney ‘s multi-layered (yet fragile) art is mainly intended as a spiritual healing-process for the wounded soul.  From: https://www.season-of-mist.com/bands/sopor-aeternus/

Nine Inch Nails - Closer

 #Nine Inch Nails #Trent Reznor #industrial #avant-garde #alternative rock #electronic rock #dark industrial #ambient #industrial metal #1990s #music video

“Closer" is a song by American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, released as the second single on their second studio album, The Downward Spiral (1994). It is considered Nine Inch Nails' signature song and remains one of their most popular hits. The music video was directed by Mark Romanek and first aired on May 12, 1994, having been filmed in April of that year. Set in what appears to be a 19th-century mad scientist's laboratory, the video's imagery involves religion, sexuality, animal cruelty, politics, and terror, including: a heart connected to some sort of device, the beat of the heart corresponding to the beat of the song; a nude, bald woman with a crucifix mask; a monkey, scared, panicked, tied to a cross; a severed pig's head spinning on some type of machine; a diagram of the vulva/vagina; and Reznor wearing various fetish gear, such as an S&M mask, ball gag, and long leather gloves while swinging in shackles. Several times, Reznor, wearing leather pants, floats and rotates through the air, suspended by invisible wires. There are also scenes of Reznor being blown back by a wind machine while wearing aviator goggles.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closer_(Nine_Inch_Nails_song)