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Music

Cooked film clips with a message? Sign yourself up for some well-founded wackiness from Neon Tetra

“Yep, it’s us. One of the strangest days of our lives. Let alone the people of Blackwood.”

We’ve recently come across Reflections, the latest single from Adelaide psychonauts Neon Tetra. It’s a free-flowing jam and a half, a bright yet slack-jawed indie rock track that isn’t afraid of treading into uncharted sonic waters. They have that dreamlike quality you hear in Slowdive or Innerspeaker-era Tame Impala, it’s palatable as it gets and just… relaxing.

I checked to see if there was an accompanying film clip, expecting a DIY ensemble or the like (shot on Super 8, probably). Boy, was I wrong.

neon tetra reflections music video

Whether you’re a man, a woman, transgender or an androgynous, pink-skinned paper mâché monster, you’ll jam out to Reflections by Neon Tetra.

The clip for Reflections is as cooked as they come, a surreal space out featuring the band members dressed in bright yellow raincoats, pink latex gloves and masks which could only be described as nightmare fuel.

As soon as we watched it, we reached out to Neon Tetra with one burning question: “what the fuck?”

“It’s a really silly one, that’s for sure. We kinda just rolled with it but it’s got some weird Conan Mockasin vibes. The band has been lucky to work with some awesome local creatives recently, who will take our music and conceptualise something completely of their own from it.”

“Merging artists and musicians has made Neon Tetra a bit of a contributor enterprise. As an independent band it’s fun to make these decisions on your own and it can yield some pretty strange fruit!”

Strange fruit indeed. While Neon Tetra aren’t the first to preach a cross-pollination between music and art, the degree to which they’ve embraced the ideal early on in their careers is worthy of praise.

On Reflections, they brought back a previous collaborator on film clip duties.

“Allow us to introduce our friend Mickey Mason of Corduroy Productions. He’s a super cool guy with some really left field concepts. He was the one behind our inter-dimensional hypnosis clip for Memoriam. Mickey has done a bunch of great videos for bands like Stork, Mesmeriser and Jungle.”

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 track=2624162610 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=333333 tracklist=false artwork=small]

But for all the surface-level silliness that their clip entails, it’s not without a deeper meaning. Quite an important one, as a matter of fact.

“The clip kind of ties in to the broader theme of Reflections, in that we are all pretty much the same. We set up all these divisions between ourselves, whether based on race, belief systems, sexuality and lifestyle choices, and don’t ever actually realise that we are, more or less, one of the same.”

“The masks kind of remove the ability to look at one’s reflection and self analyse to the nth degree, allowing us to learn who we are by simply living, which is what the clip represents.”

For a few adults dressed in paper mâché masks, it looks like Neon Tetra really have their heads screwed on. Whatever they come up with next, we’ll be waiting eagerly.

 

If you like what Neon Tetra are serving up, you’ve plenty of opportunities to catch them live in the near future. Details below:

Fri 21 July – The Captain Cook Hotel, Sydney – Event
Sat 22 July – 107 Projects, Sydney – Event
Sun 30 July – The Evelyn Hotel, Melbourne – Event