FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

[Premiere] A Family Crumbles in Aish's "Promise Me" Music Video

Get ready to put on your sad face.
Images courtesy the artist

A look of extreme personal suffering arrests a pregnant mother's face. Her fist shoots into her mouth. She bites down and—shatters, body and soul. Hope is restored when a baby emerges from the rubble. LA multimedia artist Philip Rugo visualizes this and more in the new video for "Promise Me," San Francisco art-pop up and comer Aish's account of coming out to his mother.

"I wrote 'Promise Me' to deal with my feelings of loss," Aish explains to The Creators Project. "The lyrics are what I imagined my mother saying to me before we separated. Through writing this song, I realized how my mother had the difficult job of carrying me in her womb, developing an attachment with me only to have to let go of the adult me. It made me realize our separation was hard on her too. That realization is now helping us rebuild our relationship." Rugo worked with Aish to develop this complex emotional cocktail into visuals. "The body fracturing is impactful and jagged in form yet steady and smooth in camera movement, matching the crescendos of voice and instrumentation," Rugo adds. "We attempted to tell this story with a consistently steady hand while highlighting the subtlety of the song’s voice."

Advertisement

Rugo's LA flavor is all over the video's metallic 3D avatars and neon pink color tone. We've featured his work on the site before in his collaboration with Kyttenjanae for D∆WN's "Calypso" music video, and it's exciting to see how he's taken the otherworld bacchanal aesthetic and fit it to an emotional journey of emotional violence and recovery.

See more of Philip Rugo's work on his website, and follow Aish here.

Related:

Dive into a Rainbow Alien Disco in D∆WN’s “Calypso" Music Video

The Virtual Art Gallery Levels-Up at UCLA

Virtual Organisms Writhe in Generative Music Video"Tehraj"