The unsettling industrial clatter of New ADHD by 33 collective and Astrid Sonne has us in a trance with their new single and video. Meditative electronic beats, like that of a human heart fused with a computer server, underpin an anachronistic choral chant on the track. In harmony with the haunted sonic atmosphere of their album Tripolar (on Haunter Records) their computer-generated video by Ernest studio is a sort of mirror up to society.
Surveillance culture is a big theme in the video, as cameras and lights are turned on the digital characters 360 degrees around. Nonetheless, the group behind it, Billy Bultheel, Alexander Iezzi, CEM, Ivan Cheng, are not moralistic, even if the music is dystopian. The song is complete with echoed calls and bleeping monitors. Matched with the dark shadowy smooth images, that a suspicious mind might assume are AI, the release sounds like a slow-paced video game sequence that’s tense and attention grabbing.
In the video, created by Ernest, we watch haunted hoodies playing a game. 33 shares with METAL, “Ernest, a creative studio based in Copenhagen and The Hague is run by friends of ours. It’s entirely made with traditional 3D animation, not AI. The work is about the psychological climate technology creates. The video is meant to echo a feeling of constant monitoring and never-ending performance.” Repetition, echoes, mirrors saturate the minimalist music and imagery.
The title of the track New ADHD relates to the psychological impact of technology, that has been linked to producing ADHD-like traits. Though, the group prefer to locate a wider societal impact, specifically work. Play and grind are blurred with the camera’s constant presence on the video. The musical process behind this track came from play too, improvisation, and as a serious release it begs the question if there’s some personal relation to not being able to switch off or being expected to constantly produce. Often in music and art, life is research.
33’s wider album relates to mental health too, contradictory mental and emotional states. On this single, they zoom in on “over-mediation and alienation” as the group put it. 33 describe, “A reality where everything is filtered, staged, and endlessly circulated. The quiet violence in the process of extracting innocence, where experience becomes content, and content corruption. The video embodies that tension visually, sitting somewhere between the clinical and the experiential.” There’s a sort of sleazy drawl used in the handsome vocals by Astrid Sonne, the Danish pop neo-classicist, that implores us to listen and look deeper. The music steps the line between harmony and discordance that’s part lullaby part cryptic warning.
“The album moves through different mental states that feel somewhat symptomatic of life right now, like worry, mania, ADHD, anger, alienation, neurosis.” 33 reflect. On the album itself, “Tripolar became our term for a kind of self-authored psychosis. Not in a pathological sense, but as an acknowledgment of psychic excess. If bipolar suggests oscillation between two poles, tripolar introduces a third force: something even more unstable, and generative. An emotion that captures a particular kind of intensity aggravated by music that escapes its own expectations.” It’s an experimental and ambitious release.
