Snow Ghosts have unveiled a brooding new video for 'Heavy Heart', taken from their new album A Quiet Ritual, out now via fabric's Houndstooth label. The video premiered with Clash yesterday who called it folk-horror and explained, "Snow Ghosts seem able to tap into the eerie, the uncanny... an incantation, an evocation of another England, the video picks up on this, supplying something almost Paganistic in its stylised monochrome."
Check out the video here:
The band explain, "The video for Heavy Heart is an interpretation of a Maypole dance, and the theory that the Maypole is a relic of a Pagan reverence for sacred trees. Aesthetically it's inspired by classic English folk horror such as The Wicker Man, and the films of Ben Wheatley." The video for 'Heavy Heart' sits alongside the previously released video 'Rip' and single 'Ribcage', all of which are taken from their new album A Quiet Ritual. Centring around the theme of death, the album seeks to process the shock and grief of bereavement and its aftermath, as well as casting back across history and other cultures for their own metaphors and coping strategies.Recorded in a castle in the countryside and two years in the making, A Quiet Ritual is written for an ensemble of classical and modern instruments including the carnyx, an Iron Age Celtic boar-headed horn excavated from a bog in Deskford, Scotland. For the carnyx, they enlisted the services of John Kenny, one of just a few musicians able to play the instrument and the first to do so in modern times.
The mix of instruments is indicative of the idiosyncratic timelessness common to this album and all of their previous works: having had a historical context present on their previous albums, the inclusion of the carnyx ties the release together, combining ritualistic themes with an instrument commonly used in rituals or as an offering in ancient culture. Snow Ghosts are Ross Tones, Hannah Cartwright and Oliver Knowles. Formed in 2008, their musical interests reside in our own time, the beginning of time and all points between. The trio explore the complex weave of the eternal, love, death and nature through the contemporary mediums of genres spanning electronica, post-rock and heavier sounds to create an immersive, physical ambience.Videos