Tommy Perman and Modern Studies – Sunup Shutdown (Video Premiere)
Watch the video for Sunup Shutdown, the closing track from Emergent Slow Arcs, Tommy Perman's reimagining of Modern Studies' Welcome Strangers
A former member of experimental pop band FOUND, Tommy Perman’s vast body of work includes the Scottish BAFTA-award winning 2009 sound sculpture Cybraphon, an emotional robot he created with Simon Kirby and Ziggy Campbell; technical illustrations used by 59 Productions for projection mapping on to the Sydney Opera House in 2014 as part of Vivid LIVE; and installations for 2017’s Open Close series in Edinburgh.
Limited to just 500 copies, Emergent Slow Arcs is the latest project from the designer and sound artist, and is an electronic reimagining of Modern Studies’ Welcome Strangers. Released at the end of July via Fire Records, Emergent Slow Arcs is a gorgeous piece of work that just goes to show how, from the same seed of an idea, you can end up somewhere completely different.
The Skinny are delighted to be sharing the video for album closer Sunup Shutdown, which you can watch in the above YouTube player (click here if it’s not displaying correctly). Sunup Shutdown is a woozy, stretched-out slow glide of synth swells, and not dissimilar to that slowed down by 800 percent version of Justin Bieber’s U Smile, which served as inspiration for the slow-mo theme in Alex Garland’s Dredd.
Perman tells us of the album’s inception. “Throughout my life I’ve suffered on and off from insomnia – it tends to flare up during stressful times. I decided to channel my sleeplessness into making something and Emergent Slow Arcs is the result.
“The album has become a document of my insomnia – it expresses a multitude of emotions much better than I can manage with words. In one sense I imagine the eight tracks representing my journey from sundown to sunup and the videos I created to accompany each track further explore this idea.
“The video for Sunup Shutdown goes some way to describe how I feel once morning finally arrives. It’s a strange, almost surreal sensation where everything seems hazy and the air feels thicker and more difficult to move through than it should be! It’s not always an unpleasant feeling; there’s also a sense of relief that the world is still moving around me and people are getting on with their lives.”
Emergent Slow Arcs is out now via Fire Records; Tommy Perman is giving a live audio-visual performance of Emergent Slow Arcs, opening for Andrew Wasylyk, at Chaplaincy Centre University Dundee, 29 Sep; tickets are available here
surfacepressure.net
firerecords.com