Featuring The Weeknd’s disembodied head as a demonic movie projector.
Reliquary House, the studio of long-time Oneohtrix Point Never collaborator Nate Boyce, takes on Rilke and the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac in a “debased Pixar style animation” for ‘No Nightmares’, OPN’s collaboration with The Weeknd and Caroline Polachek and a standout track from his recent album, Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.
“Dan initially sent me an excerpt of ‘Fear of the Inexplicable’ by Rilke as a prompt to start working on our idea of a debased animation,” explains Boyce. “Abel and Dan traverse psychoanalytically charged scenarios and spaces that evoke a lurid mix of art and architectural references. Eventually I started to associate the implications of the Rilke poem to the biblical story of the Binding of Isaac, an anxiety inducing story I hated as a kid that became a subtext for the latter half of the piece.”
In the animated video, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) moves through a nightmarish landscape as an animatronic avatar, pursued by the disembodied head of Abel Tesfaye (The Weeknd) who conjures malignant jesters and twisted variations of Isaac and Abraham via a cranial movie projector implant.
Despite the fact that Abraham is thwarted by divine intervention, I was terrified by his incomprehensible zealotry and willingness to sacrifice his own child, who I identified with,” continues Boyce. “This story ensured my eventual atheism, but also my ongoing fascination with how these archaic stories, symbols, and motifs have continued relevance even now, and in many ways still structure our experience. So, as it happens in the animation, this process of individuation through archetypal projection starts with heroic ideations that devolve into anxiety and fear, culminating in a carnivalesque mockery of the faith required to confront these fears.”
‘No Nightmares’ is taken from Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, which is out now on Warp Records.
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