Shimmer’s Ani Ivry-Block Made a Cryptic Video For Every Song On Her Album – AdHoc

Shimmer’s Ani Ivry-Block Made a Cryptic Video For Every Song On Her Album

The video for “Enter Shimmer” begins in silence. Snow covers the ground of a nondescript sidewalk. It covers the cars; it piles up on the curb and the foot of the building. Light snow falls across the screen, but otherwise the scene might as well be a still frame. Soon, though, you start to notice that a figure has been walking, slowly, from the edge of the horizon toward you, wearing an oversized white hat and a dress. Forty seconds in, a loud, dissonant guitar riff begins to play. The white snow is still falling, but the mood has changed into something far more agitated. The camera pans around the white-hatted figure and we follow them around the corner, into a side door, and up a dark staircase. The music becomes even more urgent, and erupts into a pinched scream. For a moment,  it's uncertain where the figure is heading. Then, red curtains appear, and a microphone, and the figure takes the stage, screaming and stomping before an invisible audience.
 
Ani Ivry-Block, Shimmer’s leader and singer, has crafted ten such videos, each singularly esoteric, one for every song on her band’s album. They are, by turns, unsettling, strange, exhilarating, arousing, funny, and terrifying. “Crystal Listerine” stumbles around in fits and starts of jagged guitar and hushed singing, but the video–which features a brightly-lit figure silhouetted behind a white sheet–provides a ghostly juxtaposition. The clip for “Let Em Know” showcases a homemade-looking, rotating wooden stage set up in someone’s backyard, one that Ivry-Block jumps around on while wearing a sleep mask and space blanket. You can almost imagine someone driving past, wondering what the hell is going on. 
 
“These videos were made over the course of ten months from October 2017 to July 2017,” says Ivry-Block. “The videos couldn't have been made possible without the help from my friend Jonah Peterschild, the man behind the camera for the majority of the shots. Get ready for visual album number two, coming out mid 2018!" 
 
Shimmer’s self-titled debut is out now on Drop Medium. Catch them opening for the legendary Pissed Jeans 11/18 at Market Hotel

 

 

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