[Premiere] Glass Ghost's New Music Video Is Half-Virtual Reality, Half-Suburban Wasteland

The "bittersweet homecoming" motif gets a digital facelift in Glass Ghost's new music video for "Home for the Holidays," off new album, LYFE (Western Vinyl), which premieres today on The Creators Project. Directed by Eben Portnoy, who also made Powerdove's visually-arresting experimental music video for "When You're Near," the piece marries keyboardist/vocalist Eliot Krimsky's high-pitched croon and drummer Michael Johnson's driving snare with sweeping aerial footage of the suburbs, Kinect facial scanning, and surreal topographical maps.

"Upon returning to his childhood home, a Man from the future meets an Angel of Truth, who forces him to realize that his past is just a flimsy facade," Portnoy explains to The Creators Project. "As the old reality strips away, the Man struggles to control memories that have grown into monstrous waves of information that consume him. The concept is inspired by today's obsession with virtual reality, so for the video we used recent technology that captures and processes the world beyond just traditional photography." The effect slowly melds the "real" and "virtual" worlds together until it's anyone's guess which is which.

On May 14, Glass Ghost will continue to explore physicality and virtuality with a free interactive performance at Lincoln Center, joining projection-mapped visuals with the blossoming genre of livestreaming apps to communicate the same tech-addled melancholia of "Home for the Holidays." The show, like Glass Ghost's new album, is also called LYFE, and is described as, "Opening with a snapshot of a young man obsessed with the fictional LYFE™ social app, every move is live-streamed to an ever-growing group of followers. While shared emotions, mundane observations and life decisions become fodder for personalized advertisements, roles of the participant and the followers blur into an ecstatic new media celebration of individuality." In other words, come to the show with a full battery and a reliable Wi-Fi connection, because you're going to want to Periscope it the whole damn time.

Glass Ghost's LYFE show was commissioned as the inaugural project of the RAMP residency program at Performance Space 122, the same arts organization behind Sebastian Errazuriz' A Pause in the City That Never Sleeps installation in Times Square, with additional support from the Jerome Foundation.

LYFE begins at 7:30 in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center. Learn more about the performance on PS122's event page, and visit Glass Ghost's website for more of their music and videos.

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