When I watch new music videos, I always make stream-of-consciousness notes on them that I then shape into a more structured description and commentary. And yet the new clip for Atoms for Peace’s “Before Your Very Eyes” (the opening track from the Thom Yorke side project’s debut album “Amok”) s so trippy and surreal that I feel my raw, unedited notes are actually the best way to adequately convey my reaction. Without further adieu, then, here is the record of my enlightening, hunger-inducing, confused and ultimately depressing journey through Yorke and co.’s hypnotic CGI world:
Undulating desert sands, moving like water, like a sheet being shaken in the wind, ad for chocolate, animated, hand coming out of sand, making me hungry, nougat, felled Thome Yorke statue, chocolate Thom Yorke, head cracked open, bearded Thom Yorke, colors running through sand, head cracking off like some ancient Egyptian statue wasting away in the sand, buildings rise from sand, signposts of civilization, skyscrapers, society rising up around old crumbling monuments, freeway overpasses, hypnotic, buildings crumble, societies crumble, we are all fucked, everything falls into black abyss, tendrils rise from colorful mass, like stalagmites in a cave, his body left suspended in mid-air, blackness