Art Feynman, the moniker of wildly talented songwriter Luke Temple, is back with a new single and accompanying music video entitled “Down with Heaven.” The track is an energetic, pulsating electro-punk cut full of rototoms (all hail the rototom renaissance!), buzzing digitized guitars, and an uncanny-valley artificial vocal delivery from Temple that’s just haunted enough to send shivers down my spine. Regarding the cut, Temple says: “Heaven is a concept that, if aimed for, only bolsters its opposite. Even as we move toward a largely secular world, the childish urge for a utopia still exists. It is thinly veiled within our obsession with optimization and our attempts to erase every blemish. Because we lack widely accepted rituals for acknowledging our darker aspects, they manifest in twisted ways.”
The accompanying video was co-directed by Dillon Hayes and Hayden Mason, and it turns surveillance technology into something powerfully human and subversive. “I’ve long been used to the idea that the tech elite view human life as something to be enumerated, optimized for, and exploited for profit,” Hayes explains, “but ever since I learned that self-driving cars use these types of Lidar scanners to see the world (and that the scanners are also increasingly used for crowd control and surveillance) it’s been hard not to see myself as a series of depersonalized dots and lines, walking through the world and being observed as data on a physical plane. We wanted to make a video that communicates that feeling of being watched in our day-to-day lives by the machines we’ve created. We also wanted to use this technology to record some of the most beautiful things humans are capable of and capture the tension between our highest potential and our worst tendencies.”
Check out “Down with Heaven” below.
