Ahead of the release of his forthcoming album Cry Sugar, out this Friday, Hudson Mohawke officially shares the video for the previously released single "Bicstan." Co-directed by Alan Resnick & comedian Patti Harrison (The Lost City, Big Mouth, Together Together) who also stars in the visual, "Bicstan" sees a high energy 1v1 basketball match between a player and a dancer as she dominates the game with spider-like supernatural abilities.
Speaking on the video's concept, Alan and Patti stated, "When we first heard the song Bicstan from Hudson Mohawke we both started dancing like crazy and couldn’t stop. When the song ended we noticed a dusty basketball in the corner of the room that was not there before. The idea for the music video came directly from this experience. We saved a lot of money on production because we already had that free basketball.”
His third album, Cry Sugar, deepens his practice of producing motivational music for club goers—uplifting the debauchery and inspiring many through his own brand of anthemic maximalism as Mohawke has dialed in an ongoing fascination with melding high and low culture. He imbues his recent work with a kind of optimism, inspiring tracks like “Dance Forever'' while hinting at an athletic ability to integrate elements of jazz fusion, prog rock, happy hardcore, chiptune, and more with formal educations in rave, hip-hop, soul, IDM, and glitch. The broad and complex nuance of all these genres and more has become the palette of the Hudson Mohawke sound.
Cry Sugar, serves as Hudson Mohawke’s first work deeply informed by apocalyptic film scores and soundtracks by everyone from the late Vangelis to the goofy major-chord pomp of 90s John Williams. Especially on tracks like “Stump,” gut-wrenching scenes emerge as party-goers return home post-club amidst rising sea-levels, bomb cyclones, and flickering wildfires. Cry Sugar also serves as Mohawke’s own demented OST to score the twilight of our cultural meltdown. Despite the apocalyptic undercurrent, Mohawke foregrounds the iridescent vibrattos of gospel choirs, soul samples, and scat-sampling throughout Cry Sugar. Known for his deft uses of fragmentation and deconstruction, Mohawke presents our fraught cultural moment as set against the quintessential backdrop of late capitalism—a tightrope walking between chaos and the unashamedly euphoric, between the erratic and the bold, the noisy and anthemic, the saccharine with the devastating. Cry Sugar becomes a testament of its namesake. In our most intimate, melancholic moments, something sweet and twisted emerges.
HUDSON MOHAWKE Bicstan video premiere
ALBUM 'CRY SUGAR' OUT THIS FRIDAY 12 AUGUST 2022