In the next three minutes of your precious time, you will be transported into a haunting noir-fi territory of ghostly sounds and phantom convulsions Iona Kewney as she performs under Rob Curry‘s direction for a music video made for Paul Haslinger‘s track, “Valse I”. The music and the video create some unsettling sounds and visuals of the contortions unearthed from the spirits within, beautifully shot on location at Tyneham in the UK, which is a ghost village used during WWI as a firing range for training the troops. The last person left the following notice on the church door: “Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.” Alas, they never returned, and the village remains abandoned to this day.
‘Valse I’ is a piece I’ve been working on for a long time. It was always this little odd piece that didn’t fit anywhere until I started working on this album. I’ve always associated weird, dreamlike scenarios with this track, carousels in slow motion, altered circus and fairground imagery. And it reflects the fact that every so often, our life turns into this strange little circus. A montage sequence of dreams.
– Paul Haslinger
I also would like to quote director Rob Curry who shares the following about the video:
“The video for Valse I features CircusNext laureate Iona Kewney performing in the ruins of Tyneham Village in Hampshire. The village was abandoned during the second world war, and the inhabitants never returned home. Since then, it has been left to rot, and nature has taken over the previous human habitations. Paul Haslinger’s music is all about decay and transformation, so it seemed a perfect setting, while Iona’s dancing combines highbrow contemporary dance techniques with contortionism. The song itself is a looped and resampled reworking of the traditional Waltz structure, so the three seemed to work together perfectly, with the dancer appearing to be as much a part of the setting as the collapsing buildings and invading wildlife.”
