Correspondence – The Kleptones, new Instamatic videotones

Have I got a little story for you: Correspondence – The Kleptones, new Instamatic videotones

Warning: contains flashing/strobe effects.

“Son, she said, have I got a little story for you”

The latest installment of the Videotones started back in July with the idea of a psychedelic spiritual desert journey – the twanging guitars and Neil Young’s trippy plaintive vocal of Correspondence obviously recalling Paris, Texas and such acid westerns as El Topo (here as ‘the king’) and Walkabout. This first half was mostly done back then, with an oddly prescient and current ending with the revolutionary violence and state oppression in the middle.

But how to finish it?

I came back to it more recently with the addition of Enter the Void for a darker (literally) ending and realised I’d created a meta narrative. Not just the intentional narrative reflecting a spiritual shamanic/afterlife journey and the (quite sad in retrospect) Ian Dury vocals suggesting reincarnation – but also a sad story about sibling relationships (‘someone and someone’), across the lines of age and time, through the bones of childhood and loss.

In this sense the single line taken from Pearl Jam’s Alive quoted above seemed totally apt, as does the whisperings (from the grave?) of:

‘Behind every word there is something I am trying to tell you…’.

Happy accidents were the eagle bit with the screaming guitar and the inclusion of Harry Dean Stanton – I didn’t know before I settled on Paris, Texas the spoken word vocals from the middle of the track are actually from his reading of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ – it’s one of my favourite bits as ‘was I speaking?’ fits so well with the non-speaking Travis and his brother.

We still need people to finish this project (close for Uptime, a long way to go for Downtime) so let me know or Mr Kleptone at eric@kleptones.com.

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