Zoon create a fast-paced, trippy slideshow in their video for “Landscapes”
Earlier this year, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada shoegaze artist Zoon released debut album Bleached Wavves, an album that Treble’s Langdon Hickman described as “brimming with life, vigor and youthful unbridled joy.” Today, Zoon shares a new video for the album’s pulsing, loop-driven standout “Landscapes,” directed by the band’s bassist Drew Rutty and his partner Vikki, depicting handheld video camera shots of natural and urban landscapes (hey!), glitchy effects, and close-ups of songwriter/vocalist Daniel Monkman in silhouette. It moves fast and transitions into unpredictable places, matching the hypnotic pace of the distorted song itself with a travelogue of moving images.
Monkman says in a statement about the song, “Musically, ‘Landscapes’ was a political art experiment that I made about the concerning amount of soul sucking ‘jobs’ that are only available to people living under the poverty line. When I first moved to Hamilton, Ontario, I could only find factory jobs that were extremely repetitive so I tried to express that in a musical sense. My goal was to create something like a loop of sound to give the listener a sense of madness. Because that’s the reality of those types of factory/ ssembly line jobs. I saw so much pain in the workers and that stuck with me. I didn’t realize that when politicians say during their campaign ‘we created 10,000 new jobs’ that they actually mean they’ve created 10,000 new ways to slowly kill vulnerable citizens.”
Check out the video for “Landscapes” below.
Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.