Just when you think you've figured out Giant Claw, its mastermind Keith Rankin pulls a Yellow Wallpaper.To lift a line from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story, his music will suddenly "plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." Giant Claw follows an unknowable pattern — sci-fi fusion, video-game music, synth-jazz noir, komische — but its new album DARK WEB attempts to make sense of the world with chopped-and-screwed R&B, trap, Windows start-up screens, footwork and ambient music. If you try to follow Rankin's skewed beat logic, you might get lost, and yet it's oddly comforting.
The video for "DARK WEB 003" provides a visual companion to an impossible mansion with melting floors, metallic orbs, neoclassical sculptures, bodies cryptically lying face-down and, by the end, "normal" rooms that feel unsettling by comparison. Director James Webster rendered the world with Blender, an open-source 3D suite, collaborating with Rankin online. He writes:
The first idea we had for the video was the hallway. I was inspired by a level from the Sega Saturn game Nights Into Dreams, where you have to toss a horrifying floating rabbit through walls in a nightmarishly endless hallway.
One of the major themes of Keith's album is this idea of growing up with the Internet, falling down rabbit holes and assimilating packets of information from an endless stream of data. Traveling down the hall, things get more and more unsettling, until the point of no return.
DARK WEB is out now on Noumenal Loom and Orange Milk.
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