Producer Art Crime is one of the most mysterious and highly acknowledged talents in Russia’s emerging underground techno scene. The Calvert Journal premieres the video for Renessense, the title track of his latest EP released on Dutch label Creme Organization. Directed by Masha Haritonova, the video, set in a quarry outside Moscow, documents the journey to the dark essence of an intimate relationship.

“I produced this record during a complicated relationship. It reflects the start, development, climax and end of the affair which left me with a year-long depression. The title track, Renessense captures the breakup and the inevitability of the end”, Art Crime explains. “Director Masha Haritonova and I were interested in the same ideas, the feelings I wanted to express in the track. It’s about the chase, alienation, obsession, distance, attempts to possess someone and the impossibility of connection between two people”.

The video was filmed in two sand and gravel quarries outside Moscow. Haritonova and Art Crime were looking for somewhere more abstract than an urban setting, a place where one could hide and get lost. The strange, temporary monochrome landscape looks almost like a different planet, a setting where time stands still and heavy emotions fill the space along with the beats. “The video starts with two whippets filmed on VHS cameras by our camera man Evgeny Rodin”, Haritonova explains. “I wanted to capture the strange choreography of their fragile bodies. The barely visible movement, the pace, the breath in their ribs…this acts as a bridge to the main focus of the video, the woman’s gaze. It’s about something sublime, something mesmerising in the distance, something you’ll never be able to possess, something bigger than you. The video is an attempt to capture this elusive something. The eclipse in the end is a metaphor for the blindness the viewer. It’s something destructive which you keep following nonetheless”.

Text: Anastasiia Fedorova
Directed by Masha Haritonova