Travel

A music video for the newly released track “Travel” from Sardinian music producer Claudio Melis from his new album Sraka. The synopsis of the video talks about two angels who have fallen from heaven, trapped in a dream world they are forced to perform a bizarre ritual for the watching gods. The dark ambient music playing is matched by an equally dark atmospheric story.

Set in a forest landscape, presumably in Sardinia, its contrasting light and dark shadows of the trees amongst the rocky terrain provide an ethereal backdrop. The camera slowly pans down to earth from the sky to a girl laid on the ground in a distorted like heap. Dressed all in white with her eyes bandaged she slowly stumbles to her feet and gropes her way through the woodland. She’s being watched by someone dressed in a dark cloak and gas mask who follows her as she finds someone else similarly laid on the floor, presumably also fallen from the heavens. Together they wander through the trees before they begin a love-making dance ritual in the presence of the god with the soundtrack continuing throughout.

Both the video and the music are dark and atmospheric in sound and appearance but they don’t necessarily synchronise together especially well. The synth music sounds more like an ambient loop than telling a story from beginning to end. Some of the peaks and troughs in the track match the movements, but overall it seems caught between being a movie and a music video with the music not quite rising to the high crescendos to match the climatic end to the story.

The camera shots establish the atmosphere of the video well but lack a cinematic edge in their framing and grading to really take it to the next level. There’s perhaps a lack of sharpness to the images, which although some are done for filmic effect, filming under the canopy of the forest perhaps requires additional lighting, that would make this a far more complicated and expensive music video to shoot.

I quite liked the acting that had the awkward air of being blind and lost in an otherworldly wilderness and showed some dramatic suffering too. Unfortunately some of the supporting props left a lot to the imagination but didn’t necessarily detract too much from the story once you bought into the production and brought their own pastiche stamp to the video.