Using music fragments remembered from dreams, Chicago-based artist Patrick Holbrook, under his solo moniker Well Yells, constructs ghostly darkwave sounds with minimal surreal lyrics, that build their own logic in the imagination of “the entity you call to at the bottom of the well.”
Well Yells releases an evocative DIY video, directed and edited by Patrick Holbrook himself with camera by Rebecca Schoenecker, Andrew Neher, and Patrick Holbrook, for the gripping track “When” off his third 8-track full-length album “We Mirror the Dead”, a fascinating visual exploration into the shared terrors found within the primitive nature of mankind.
All-encompassing brooding and harrowing intensity weave a meandering solemn pace of death into crispy and resonant mechanical rhythms, cloaked in ominous, pulsing droning low ends, sporadically swept by sharp airy gusts of synth coldness, as feather-light airless male vocals release submerged deafening cries and dry hoarse ramblings, left suffocating under the swelling and hissing atmospheric distortion.
Absorbing lyrics unravel in an anxious stream of consciousness, aligning esoteric eccentricities into an obsessive-compulsive thought process, filled with superstitious idiosyncrasies.
Hypnotic, slow-motion video, transforms an ordinary moment in time into an intimate surreal image using the force of the wind to billow a black silk robe toward an ominous shape-shifting cloud, set against a light blue sky, wherein lies more questions than answers for the mind’s eye of imagination to brood upon. Thought-provoking scenes alternate between a solemn black and white introspection and a subterranean cavern, where low light shines an otherworldly glow onto menacing crevices, emitting a cyber green static that scans the tomb of mirrored identity with a robotic circular intelligence, bringing forth a disturbing feeling of misunderstood isolation and fear.
Keep up with Well Yells:
