Metal and embroidery may not go hand in hand when you first think about it, but London band Throne may just change your mind with the 45 million stitches in the video for "Tharsis Sleeps."
Throne's lead singer and director of the video Nicos Livesey created the above visual over the course of eight months with 3,000 individually embroidered frames. The elaborately-sewn designs are combined into beautiful stop-motion animation to tell the psychedelic story of a terraforming mission to Mars gone wrong. The swirling colors and ornate designs are a marriage of high and low technology. Livesey tells Dazed:
We wanted to play with the fact that travelling through space is meant to look really high-tech, but we tried to merge really low-tech stuff in there like the computers they use. Based on old 50s NASA exhibitions. The satellite is based on the Mariner 9 mission. It’s all based on really old space travel, around this theory that is based on the future.
Originally it was going to be in black and white and only 90 seconds long, and it was going to be a completely abstract psychedelic visual piece. When I started looking for a more advanced machine, I spoke to Brother Machinery which lent us three fully industrial embroidery machines which can do up to ten colours. It was once they gave us those, I was like, ‘Well it would be silly not to utilise these incredible machines. Let’s get colour in there.’ Once we had the power to make so many so quickly – well, reasonably – we decided to make it a full video with a narrative and we just went for it. We basically got way too ambitious!
The video may have taken its toll on Livesey -- “I completely ruined any kind of social life. I haven’t spoken to anyone in the past few months. This is the most ridiculously stupid idea," he says -- but the groundbreaking beauty of the clip makes it seem totally worth it.
Read the full interview about "Tharsis Sleeps" over at Dazed. For more music from Throne, check out their official Facebook and Bandcamp pages.
Source: Dazed Digital
