“Break Apart,” the latest track from electronic musician Bonobo, is a haunting reflection on fear and brokenness. Its potency is due in no small part to the melancholic singing of the moody R&B duo Rhye, but the visuals of the accompanying video help, too. Art director Neil Krug created what he calls “a hyper-real tableau of smoke plumes and fire.”
It started with a vague idea. Simon Green, who performs as Bonobo, wanted the video darkly pretty, but without obvious metaphors or storylines. “He was looking for something beautifully sinister," Krug says, "but something not too on the nose---no literal interpretation of the music." His job, he realized, was to create a special world for the album Migration to inhabit.
And so over the course of mornings last summer, Krug found himself up before dawn, flying a DJI Inspire drone over some particularly remote patches of the Mojave Desert, the subject and setting of "Break Apart."
The world he created combines an otherworldly landscape with the cinematography from Thelma and Louise. It’s devoid of any signs of life---Krug says he keeps a “mental Rolodex” of shooting locations in the Mojave, and chose a dozen or so rarely visited canyons and lake beds. It looks volcanic, almost bloody. That’s all manipulated. Like the desert itself, the footage had a blanched hue. “If you look at the raw film it’s very white and milky and creamy,” Krug says. “The final result is as crunched down as one can get without being ridiculous.”
Krug says the choice to use a drone was an obvious one. The music video needed motion, something the tiny aircraft delivers easily and cheaply. “It needed some forward momentum,” he says. “It’s a slower track, so the video could have gotten boring really quickly, if we were just on tripod at the time.” Boring? Perhaps. But with scenery like this, that's hard to imagine.
