In 2021, two veterans and former members from the original Northern UK mid-80s goth-new wave band Cold Dance, Kevin Hunter (Chicago, Illinois) and Diane Dubois (UK), reunited, across the Atlantic, on Facebook and began making music, via emails and DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations), under the moniker of Lunar Paths. The pair already have 16 singles published on Bandcamp, and now their first full-length video for the latest track “Halo.”
Kevin had a nightmare that woke him from his sleep. It was a terrifying stress dream, whose only redeeming feature was its amazing soundtrack! Fired up by this, he had to leave his bed in the middle of the night in order to record the drum patterns, lest he forget them by morning. Diane heard them and said that they conjured images of someone being hounded to breaking point: some good and honest soul trying to please, but never able to work hard enough to satisfy an insatiable system.
Haunting, rousing, and instinctual, “Halo” is a powerful composition of crackling primal atmospheric energy that staggers through ominously cyclical tight tribal percussions and swooshing FXs, lacerated by jagged, shrieking distortions, that resonate harshly around evocative vocals, layering urgent and whispered spoken words with dramatic cries, to build tension and release pain, into a dark, merciless void.
Lyrics came from late night discussions about friends and former colleagues who, like so many of us, were made to feel like ‘useful idiots’ at some point, manipulated by the fantasy that they are appreciated, into giving their all—to a job, to a relationship–until they finally wake up to the fact that there is no reward, no prize, no cheque in the post. In a system that runs on exploitation, whose lifeblood depends on selling the lie that hard work will be rewarded, and where the prevailing fiction is the idea that justice and fairness will prevail, waking up is the first step.
DIY black and white visuals cast a fuzzy haze of low light vision over a bewitching performance by Diane Dubois to sync with the nightmarish theme of the soundtrack. Transformative lights and shadows combine with intense facial expressions, symbolic hand gestures, and trippy asymmetric editing to trigger a nocturnal perception along with surreal flows of distorted motion.
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