San Fermin - Weird Environment (Official Music Video)

Listen to Weird Environment here : https://orcd.co/weird-environment

Directed by Matthew Slotkin & Ellis Ludwig-Leone
Edited by Matthew Slotkin

Written by Ellis Ludwig-Leone & Allen Tate
Produced by Allen Tate
Mixed by Lars Stalfors
Mastered by Pete Lyman
Recorded at Better Company Records

This song was fueled by the manic energy that comes just after a breakup, when everything feels ultraviolet and surreal. I wanted the music to be always charging forward– you have to keep moving or you’ll drown.

The song is about the disorientation of that time, how your whole world feels suddenly fake and unpleasant. I’ve also felt a related sense of distress around the approach of AI in the world of art and music. So I thought it might be cool to use a tool that makes me uncomfortable to create a music video that captures that same feeling of discomfort. It felt like a way of engaging with the issue, rather than ignoring it and just having this abstract blanket of fear around it.

We took a press photo of me— the first one ever taken, when I was 21— and then transformed it into 37 different ‘Ellises,’ based on stylistic prompts. We situated them in the environments described in the song, and taught them to sing along to the lyrics. Then we blew them up in cartoonish explosions.

While we were making it, the AI felt less like an ‘author’ and more like a tool, which was reassuring. (And still a pretty wonky tool, to be honest.) I still feel anxious about where it’s all headed– that in the rush around AI we try to remember why we make art in the first place, which is that it’s nice to communicate with other people. But also: it’s funny as hell to see a portrait of me as Taylor Swift, or Popeye, or a Picasso painting, and then destroy it. My hope is that the concept and the juxtaposition, which came from human authors, are what makes it feel substantive, or at least more than a party trick.

After a break up, you try on a bunch of personalities, living in this uncanny valley where nothing feels quite right. The strange animations we made felt like the right way to say something about that time. It was also a fun way to render a bunch of flooded environments, and to touch on some of the global stresses we have all been feeling recently.

- Ellis

Lyrics:

Burned my life down to the ground
Emptied out the Hungry Ghost
Wrote a sad song to get it out
If it helped I didn’t notice

Got my space but I need a couch
I’m adrift or I’m an island
When I think too much about it
All the lights go ultraviolet

Really coming down today
Gimme somewhere dry to spend the night
I can sleep in anything
I don’t need to shut my eyes too tight

I’m a weird environment these days
Map me out but then winds change
Every hour takes a week
I’m a weird environment these days
Another night out in this place
Take me home or out to sea
Don’t leave

In the morning when we wake up
And there’s water to the bedposts
And you’re washing off your makeup
And I’m washed out like the Gulf Coast

I’m a weird environment these days
Map me out but then winds change
Every hour takes a week
I’m a weird environment these days
Another night out in this place
Take me home or out to sea
Don’t leave
Don’t leave

2024 Better Company Records

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