Amnesia Scanner are back in business with their first release since album STROBE.RIP out this time last year. The new release, Over, on PAN label comes in three forms: singles AS Over, FT Over and the music video AS Over. AS Over is anthemic and trancey, their schitzo-pop hooks hit hard underlined with tinny percussion. The accompanying video releases today.
The single FT Over and video for AS Over are a collaboration with Freeka Tet whose vocals feature on the STROBE.RIP album and whose creative visuals are part of the duo, Amnesia Scanner’s, output. The FT Over single reveals an ambient track within the lowkey but rave-y number after applying an active noise cancellation script to the original single. In the video he directs for Amnesia Scanner, the artists appear to similarly approach the idea of visual noise and excess following plastic bags around the city. Waste-material becomes the protagonist.
Mosh pits on the city street and the supermarket are showered in plastic bags as we steep in the auto-tune, synthetic vocals of the track. Plastic and synthetic sounds are a perfect pairing, like a fine red wine and hard Manchego cheese, the visual and sonic flavours marry in harmony. During the video there’s a glimpse of drivers with plastic bags on their heads that instantly evokes Rene Magritte’s The Lovers II, that seemed to foretell the Internet’s wrapping of individuals in the cyberspace so that they might interact seemingly intimately but without touching. As Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are artists who commentate on technology, we might assume that this video interrogates human relationships online, with flashes of iPhones and a scene with a computer wrapped in plastic.
Amnesia Scanner’s press release reads, “It is a satirical allegory about humans, technology and the eternal loop of excitement, fear and acceptance told with the humble plastic as protagonist and antagonist. It exists at the current limits of AI generated video, both in form and content.” It’s hard to tell that this production employs the use of AI, since the images are hyperreal, high resolution and believable in their weirdness. The video’s literal documentation of excessive waste material is an easy comment on environmental degradation, whereas the synthetic wrapping of people might be a symbolic reference to interpersonal relationships. It’s hard to not think of the plastic bag, covering or glove as an image of sterilisation, a preventative measure to protect us. But what from?