Directed and produced by Craig Ward, the video is enchanting, magical, strange. What are those delicate white lines? Icicles? Spider webs? Crystals? The press release offers only a cryptic explanation: “The movements of a music-box ballerina are reinterpreted in a groundbreaking video for British composer Ryan Teague using electromagnetic fields, subzero temperatures, and 2000 volts of electricity.”

A behind-the-scenes look offers more clues:

Craig Ward explains:

When I first heard ‘Cascades’ isolated from the rest of [Field Drawings], winter was very much in the air and the sharp, twinkling notes called to mind at once falling snow, but also a memory from my childhood of a broken jewelry box that belonged to my grandma. The partnerless ballerina in the center of the box would rotate tremulously to a sparse and lonely clockwork soundtrack that echoed through the overwound springs in the base.

The video we created to accompany the track was shot over four days in a basement in Pennsylvania, and took almost four months of planning and research. The owner of said basement was Linden Gledhill, a biochemist cum macrophotography enthusiast. I had been put in touch with him by kinetic still-life photographer, Jason Tozer, a previous co-conspirator whom I had asked to be director of photography for the project.

Ryan Teague’s Field Drawings (CD, Village Green VG003) is available now from Forced Exposure.