A new release from British musician, producer and DJ Bonobo "Kerala" cleverly uses cinematography from director Bison in its music video, a visual representation of the struggles undergone during a bad psychedelic induced "trip". What strikes me about this music video is how the visual experience itself for the audience helps to encapsulate the mental difficulties sometimes experienced as a result of taking psychedelic substances - the repetition being a struggle to watch, to make sense of, as well as the difficulty in first spotting the surreal aspects / hallucination elements depicted in the video. The mind really can play tricks on you.
Please watch this!
Below are is a list of the surreal elements as they appear in the video - things to watch out for and get your head around.
0:00 - meteor
1:00 - rock levitating
1:05 - man on bench feeds nonexistent birds
1:50 - building floating, rotating
2:02 - door caves in
2:15 - man in restaurant's eyes glow
2:27 - tv footage shows the video about 30 seconds into the future flipped horizontally
2:42 - man crossing street duplicates
2:50 - restaurant sign foreshadows building fire
3:03 - car gradually changes colour
3:06 - man floating in sky
3:16 - fire in building
3:28 - solar eclipse
3:46 - people standing in a grid pattern, looking up
3:57 - birds take flight (or are they humans?)
This video brings to the audience a sense of the possible psychosis experienced when participating in a psychedelic trip- something which in itself has proved notoriously difficult to explain by the subjects who experience it. Maybe this has a message which coincides with mine - the possible dangers of the psychedelic experience if someone is to ignore the importance of 'set and setting', an unguided experience - something which is key if wanting to gain therapeutic value when experiencing altered states of consciousness and one commonly overlooked during recreational use of psychedelic plant based substances.
