Easy Easy rider
King Krule has released a new video for “Cadet Limbo” – a track that features on his sublime second album, The OOZ. Krule describes the video as a road movie, because it has “a weird, Easy Rider thing going on.”
The video is directed by photographer Charlotte Patmore, who has previously worked with artists like Charli XCX and Kate Nash. More recently, she joined Krule on his American tour, taking portraits of him on and off stage. While on the road, she took a break from snapping stills and instead shot Krule and the band’s saxophone player, Galgo, with a video camera. The result of this documentation is a grainy, black-white video, which depicts Krule – cigarette always in hand, sunglasses on – walking down hotel corridors, across desert landscapes and sitting in empty theatres. All the while monotonous clouds float above him, a saxophone murmurs with dread and the mysterious Galgo dissolves in and out of frame. It’s all wonderfully Lynchian.
In an interview with WePresent, Krule explained the idea behind the video: “The concept of the video became that (Galgo) is this important figure that I couldn’t quite get my hands on. Him behind me playing sax and then disappearing. My outfit stayed the same and Galgo's outfit kind of stayed the same. We'd put on our outfits and go out and film it. We were very lucky in terms of the landscapes and the architecture that we got to film against.”
“We were very lucky in terms of the landscapes and the architecture that we got to film against” – King Krule
The film’s landscape is warped, veering on dream-like. Exit signs flicker, buildings are eerily symmetrical and everything is obscured by shadow. The saxophone player seems to be a figure within Krule’s subconscious – a phantom representing the banality and monotony of life on the road. Despite this surrealism, there’s also something recognisable about the environment that Krule skulks in. This probably has to do with the fact that motels, deserts and highways are often the backdrop to many famous American films. “(The landscape) is really cinematic as well, automatically. It feels Hollywood”, Patmore says.
The music video previous to “Cadet Limbo” was “Biscuit Town” and in both videos, Krule takes on the “same character”, as he reflects on WePresent. Yet, Krule’s quick to highlight the differences in the way this new video was constructed: “I think it’s the opposite of the Biscuit Town video. That was an idea getting proposed, this was more like, sounded out together. It was like a day to day thing, because that's how it was shot – a month together doing this. There weren’t really any deadlines. There was more of an art to it, and making an archive of it, as well.”
Watch the video for “Cadet Limbo” below.