Daisy Heroin—aka Colin Dawson—is back with a new short film, the first installment in a monthly series that will run on his website. Called Thee Holy Ones, the clip looks like Hieronymus Bosch paintings run through the whimsically sinister sensibilities of Monty Python's Flying Circus animator Terry Gilliam.
Dawson, who also played guitar in the caustic post-punk group Stickers, has made a twisted, stream-of-consciousness fever dream whose imagery would take a dozen viewings to come to a hazy conclusion about its motives and meanings. Some of the elements that flit by: casual body-part severings; bizarre substances flowing from eyes and mouths; eyeballs becoming planets with eyeballs on them; a man o' war with an astronaut helmet, a pyramid drifting in space, the cover of Grace Jones's excellent 1982 LP Living My Life repeatedly floating toward the viewer. Basically, Thee Holy Ones parades the fucked-up morphings of dreams imagined while on the strongest hallucinogens, all set to a subtly unnerving electronic soundtrack—which he records under the name T—that exists in the subterranean realms of dark-ambient masters Lustmord and David Toop.
"The idea for the project came after a time when all my equipment started breaking down and I basically stopped making movies," Dawson explained in an email interview. "It seemed like a time to step back and try and look at things differently. However, I feel like I had too much mental energy from not creating, and turned into a bit of an insomniac. I didn't mind; I like getting into the weird sleep deprived mind. I'd lay in bed telling myself stories, or practicing different forms of meditations until I passed out. So, when I bought a new computer, it seemed necessary/fun to compile all those daydreams and practices into a movie. The project seems big, so my attempt to make it fun for myself, is to release it in chapters, month by month. Thee Holy Ones is kind of a crossing over into another world."
By the way, Stickers' new album, Joy, is their last, and it's worth a significant portion of your dwindling attention span. Recorded and mixed by Stranger Genius nominee Erik Blood, Joy bursts with brilliantly brooding and abrasive songs that fling you back into an English bunker club circa 1982, where nobody's smiling and everyone's righteously agitated. Stickers are going on out on a low-slung high note. They will be missed.
