PREMIERE: Collapsing Scenery Share “The Grey Cardinal” Video

The clip channels Russian propaganda and a chain-smoking clown.
PREMIERE: Collapsing Scenery Share “The Grey Cardinal” Video

The clip channels Russian propaganda and a chain-smoking clown.

Words: Kim March

photo by Rick Rodney

April 07, 2020

Last year, Brooklyn/LA synthwave duo Collapsing Scenery released their debut LP Stress Positions amid remixes for artists including Youth Code, Uniform, Gang Gang Dance’s Brian DeGraw, and the late Genesis P-Orridge. It was a record bursting with ideas, incorporating their takes on art, film, and politics into fourteen electronic experimentations.

Today, they’re sharing a video for the album track “The Grey Cardinal,” a jagged, pulsing number which, the band’s Reggie Debris shares, takes its title from the nickname for Russian propagandist Vladislav Surkov. “His tactics, largely derived from his background in experimental theater, essentially boil down to creating a thicket of confusion and mistrust out of which a strong leader can emerge and provide a sense of stability and solidity,” Devris says. “The song is a meditation on how these ideas and tactics have proliferated across the modern political landscape and exploded with the prevalence of online news and web based communities, as well as a sort of abstract character study of Surkov himself, an eminently fascinating demon of modern discourse.”

The accompanying clip, directed by Mads Jensen, takes these chaotic politics and imposes them over images inspired by the director’s harlequin proclivities. “I’ve been dressing up as Carrington the Clown—a cackling, chain-smoking hooligan who means well but too often surrounds himself with delinquents—for about two years now,” Jensen shares. “After hearing ‘The Grey Cardinal,’ I envisioned Carrington getting drugged by a devious sex pot waitress, losing all his money in a poker game, and wandering round the streets of Las Vegas, tripping out of his mind while struggling to find a hotel room. The video was a great excuse to road trip with friends to some of my favorite places and to also make a video of all my favorite things: men with rosy cheeks and over-glossed lips, blemmyes, mermaids, strippers, and, of course, Carrington the Clown.”

Watch the video below, and order Stress Positions here.