One might not expect that a proclivity for noise and electronic music would come to someone 19 years of age. One would be wrong. Connor Sullivan has been performing under the moniker of Argus for the past few years, and his compositions very comfortably sit amongst the most seasoned of noise artists. His new video for his track, “Queen,” (off his forthcoming album, Fetishized Hatred) is but a glimpse into a prodigious understanding of sonic expression, and an understatedly mature knowledge of self and feeling. Eerie modulations kind of ease you into an acid bath, and all good feeling is left at the door. Suspenseful percussive chimes enter like that shadowy figure at the end of a dimly lit hallway in horror movies. The sound shifts and morphs as a beat is introduced, or is that just the sound of your own heart anxiously pounding against the inside of your ribs? It’s not a feel-good sound, no. But indeed it expresses fear and malaise familiar to us all. The dude’s 19 and he knows himself and the complexity of catharsis better than most.
The visuals, directed by Kari Leigh Ames, only add to the doom feeling in the pit of your stomach. Images jump and blur and dissolve from one to the next: a restless hive, piglets suckling, a terrified Mickey Mouse, a crazed and blazing countryside scene. It’s chaos, it’s grotesque, it’s horrifying, enough so to make you squirm in your seat, all seemingly projected onto a wall in front of which the expressionless face of the young man stands. The video and track together flaunt a preternatural insight to the horror of modern living, perhaps a prophecy of life to come.
Fetishized Hatred is out September 8 via Drop Medium’s electronic label, DM Hardware.
