Virtual Perfection Cowboy’s “Natureboy” Video Is an ASMR Delight – AdHoc

Virtual Perfection Cowboy’s “Natureboy” Video Is an ASMR Delight

This music video may make you feel something—maybe a lot of things.

In an effort to elicit an autonomic sensory motor response—a pleasant, tingling sensation in the head and neck triggered by certain audio and visual stimuli, believed to promote relaxation and relieve stress—the Queens artist known as Virtual Perfection Cowboy subjects himself to all manner of spine-tingling textures in the new video for his track “Natureboy”: A paint-covered brush swirls across his face, his finger tickles a sticky, bright yellow flower, and his body gets coated in blades of grass.

Watching the artist, real name Dash Lunde, experience these things is oddly relaxing, a feeling that’s helped by the score. Ambient electronic synth form a backdrop for Lunde’s pitched-down voice, his words incomprehensible. These chanting vocals aim to hypnotize and add to the piece’s overall dreaminess.

Lunde, who said he concentrates on shapes while writing music, has often felt ASMR responses as a listener.

“I never had any idea what it was when I was younger,” he told AdHoc via email. “I found out about it in the course of making the album, and it’s become an even more important part of how I understand sound. I’ve always been interested in the physical aspect of sound, and ASMR, in some ways, is like this intimate, sensual relationship with sound.”

The video, directed by Brooklyn photographer Carina Allen, is one of a series that accompany tracks off Lunde’s ASMR-centric album 754, released in September. He told AdHoc the sounds of ASMR are meant to “provide people with a calming sense of intimacy.”

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