Stephen Mejias

Here’s the video for “Cascades” from Ryan Teague’s Field Drawings.

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.