Moby is coming back with a psychedelic self-directed music video and a new album at the end of September. “A Case for Shame” is a collaboration with Canadian singer-songwriter Cold Specks and the first single of the forthcoming Innocents. The video is the artist’s directorial debut and features some disturbing masks and Moby floating underwater in his Los Angeles pool, all in vivid colours and grainy photography. Ignoring the distant reminiscence of a poaching egg, the artist explains that the visual style is inspired by 1930s pioneer of experimental cinema Jack Smith (also said to have influenced film-making icons like Fellini and Andy Warhol) and is by no means pretending for any high artistic merit, just ‘completely open to anyone’s subjective interpretation’.
The video is both directed and shot by Moby and depicts a trippy yet somehow beautiful rendition of what life after death might be: ‘I've drowned, and I've gone to an after-life inhabited by people who are concealing themselves because of shame’ explains Moby. Not intended as frightening, the masks could be interpreted as archetypes of what hides behind them - cowardice for the ‘rabbit’, debauchery for the ‘blond lady’, etc. Or something along those lines. There is plenty of symbolism to be read in there, which was Moby’s main idea I guess, so I’d leave you to watch, get confused, and spill all that onto his website.
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