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Music

Insect Ark's Creepy New Animated Video for "The Collector" Will Chill You to the Bone

A nightmarish hodgepodge of Japanese ghost films, bleak animation, and distorted doom awaits.

Photo by Chris Carlone

Dana Schechter used to be known best as the bassist for Michael Gira's Angels of Light (or perhaps for fronting her own band, Bee and Flower), but since 2011, the multi-instrumentalist has reaped considerable acclaim for her work with the experimental noise metal of her latest project, Insect Ark. The recent addition of a second member—drummer and electronics operator Ashley Spungin of Taurus and Purple Rhinestone Eagle—has enabled Schechter to bring her bleak, abstract aural vision to the stage, and 2015 marks Insect Ark's busiest year yet. The band released a pounding LP, Portal/Well, via Autumnsongs Recordings earlier this year, and has now completed work on its latest transmission, an unhinged and unsettling new animated video for" The Collector."

Schechter (who wrote and recorded all the music for Insect Ark as well as handling the animation and directing the video) commented, "It’s always a challenge to make visuals for my own music - how do you tell a story for a song with no words? "The Collector" is the tale of a wandering drifter who seeks out lost human souls, swallowing and extinguishing their spirits; the story came to me after the music was complete. Visual inspiration was partly drawn from black & white 1960s Japanese ghost films, but the filthy animated rural/urban landscapes are how it looks in my dreams: barren, looming, washed-out and absent of people. We used a video back-projection in front of dancer Mee Ae, and also filmed her on a greenscreen so I could work her into other animations in post production, which editor Alan Dubin (also the vocalist of Khanate/Gnaw) used in the larger edit."

Press play to reveal its horrors below: