[Premiere] CGI Windsurfing and Psychedelics Collide in This Music Video

Ancient M’ocean album sleeve. Image courtesy of the artist

It might star a race of mutant people living in a dimension adjacent to our own, but this is far from your standard sci-fi: Ancient M’ocean (Phantasy), from Brazil's Babe, Terror, is a concept album of sorts. It comes accompanied by a 20-page comic book, conceived by Babe, Terror and illustrated by Michael Crook, that works as an introduction to these people, their sports, customs, and seasonal traditions.

Today, The Creators Project premieres first track released from Ancient M'ocean, "Windsurf For Souls II." It comes with a music video conceptualized by the musician and directed by Mario Cascardo. Like the music, it has a raw edge, full of feedback and what the musician calls "psychedelic melancholy."

Panels from the comic that accompanies the album

The surreal video features CGI windsurfers intercut with amateur-like footage as images and realities blur and fade in and out in a slightly unsettling 'found footage' manner as the music churns along. Babe, Terror notes that he wanted it to have "a certain home movie and cinema air."

For Babe, Terror the characters are fictive manifestations of the more abstract moods and emotions that making music provokes and stirs. "What I try in these songs is a dive into myself in an attempt to articulate a few dozen melodies and instrumental combinations that could describe and repeat my deepest and most fundamental, most remote, musical emotion," Babe, Terror explains to The Creators Project. "I tell, with the music, without lyrics, about this remote post-Antarctic land in which there are strange people, somehow mutant also, that refers a little to Nicholas Ray's film, The Savage Innocents, which has very similar traits to the traits we recognize on a human face."

The song's theme of windsurfing came about because, for one, the musician imagined it would be a nice activity to do. "It must be an intense pleasure that I would like to experience," he says. "But I do not have money and I do not live near the beach. When I was composing the songs, I imagined, although I did not think the record was just that, they were analogous to the spectrum of long afternoons being lived there in the ocean, in a boat, in a sail floating gracefully. I understand this as a great therapy, and I could feel in the songs the scent of that remote, distant, strange, ancient fall of the afternoon, which nonetheless could manifest itself clear to me."

Screengrab via

Also for the song, like the album, ocean and water are relevant to the narrative around these imagined people whose borders begin in the ocean at the south pole. "It comes from an imagination of the Earth as a vast non-global, non-circular infinite, but an extensive and open tapestry of landscapes that unfolds and unfolds and unfolds without an end," notes Babe, Terror.

The music video is also Cascardo's interpretation of this saga in the form of collaging various lo-fi visual components together. He explains that the edit also partly emulates the music samples, methods, and effects used by Babe, Terror. "I think both of us like to work with trash or somehow defiant material," notes Cascardo. "Things that only oddly could become good."

You can check out "Windsurf For Souls II" below:

Babe, Terror's Ancient M'ocean is out January 27, 2017 on Erol Alkan's label, Phantasy. You can pre-order the album and comic book limited to 300 physical copies here. Learn more about Babe, Terror here.

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