(Official video by Eris is Red)
Max Cooper:
This chapter of the Unspoken Words album story (https://www.unspokenwords.net) deals with the arrival of abstract thought as a tool for human expression, visualised by the artist Eris is Red. A hypnotic model of reality is created and explored, with reaction diffusion forms reminiscent of the real world, but never quite real. Familiar symbols are visually referenced as a tool for building and communicating abstraction and new ways of thinking from the ground up, with the new model of reality emerging as meaning emerges from the symbols of our language.
I wrote the piece of music during some difficult times of isolation. It came from a live improvisation where I found a hypnotic repeating structure that made me feel the creation of something new and hopeful. It yielded an abstract space I became lost in for months. I came across the beautiful voice of Kotomi (Lauren Culjak) from the ending sequence of an episode of Rick and Morty (S4 E10), where she sings “Don’t look back” in collaboration with Ryan Elder. Something about her voice immediately grabbed me. It has a beautiful otherworldly quality to it which strengthened the feeling of the abstracted space I was trying to create. And I was surprised and happy to find that she was interested in working together on the track, and ok with me mangled her voice into granular oblivion to try and capture the feeling of human expression without the literal restrictions of lyrics.
The Dolby Atmos mix for the Blu-ray/Atmos streaming version, was created together with Adam Hare and Niels Orens, focusing on an organic slow moving and inviting space for becoming lost inside, without rigid structures, and lots of improvised paths of sounds through space, in line with the feel of the original piece of music.
Eris is Red:
"Wittgenstein's concept of Sprachspiel, or Language Games, describes the fluid nature of how we communicate and how it contextually based and can change the very reality we experience. The organic and ever changing nature of the visuals is intended to represent that core base of our collective reality. The beautiful abstract motion of reaction-diffusion felt the right fit to communicate that concept.
When I was contacted by Max for this project I had been experimenting with a technique of creating animated 2D greyscale image sequences that were then used to drive both 3D displacement as well as material mixes. One side effect of the process is a certain 'banding' that occurs when the bit depth is limited and there is not enough information to have a smooth gradient between the values of black and white, this artefact is usually undesirable, however with the pulsing hypnotic melody of the song I was able lean into it and it became part of the art direction.
After the initial displacement maps were created, they were imported into Cinema 4D, where I displaced flat planes and other objects and did countless experiments of mixing and blending the maps and clamping values to drive material mixes based on the topology. Throughout the process I used both Cycles4D and Redshift to render."