One of the more creative bassists of our time (not named Squarepusher) is Stephen Bruner, a.k.a., Thundercat. Nestled on Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder, he's played on some of his label boss’ records and worked as a session musician for many other artists. His latest record, the mini-LP The Beyond / Where the Giants Roam is out today, and the lead single “Song for the Dead” is a great slice of cosmic, jazzy R&B full of Thundercat’s typically amazing fretwork.
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Also out today is the music video for the track. Directed by Ryan McShane (a.k.a., RY NO), the video is a combination of animation and NASA footage backgrounds. Like the song, it’s a cosmic bit of creativity, with some morphing shapes and colors. It’s not exactly psychedelic, but it lies somewhere on the spectrum.
"I was born in 1995, the year Kids came out and Jerry Garcia passed away, and I've been drawing ever since,” McShane says of his work leading up to the video. “15 years later I dropped out of high school to spend a couple of years indoors, drawing in my room. One night in August 2013, I drew a fake cover for Captain Murphy's Between Villains. I posted it to Twitter and the [Mad]villain himself retweeted it, and so did Thundercat.”The two struck up a friendship on Twitter. Fast forward to the present: McShane heard the new album, and after a two-week break spent indoors working on drawings, hit on an idea for a music video. While listening to the track “Song For The Dead”—the sounds at 1:49, to be exact—McShane found the idea he needed to animate.
“I wanted to animate this few seconds of a transformation as the sound spins around in stereo,” he explains. “But I had a few days free, so I decided to block out a full video. Super rough, black-and-white, with NASA footage backgrounds—I had a bunch on hand that I found whilst researching for Breeder's The Expanse titles—and then I just sent it to Thundercat.”
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“He loved it, so I was locked into it now, my first big solo animation,” he adds. “Naturally, the way I work, I made it even harder for myself, adding colors and extra seconds. Shout out to Breeder co-worker Alex Gee for suggesting I add color.”
But McShane doesn’t ditch the black-and-white altogether. The video’s first few frames roll in black-and-white with an acid western vibe, then explode at the moment of a death. Overall the switch is effective, and fits the sonic metamorphoses in Thundercat’s new track very nicely indeed.
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