NEW MUSIC VIDEO BLENDS TIME TRAVEL AND GREEK MYTH
February 28, 2012 — Today songwriter Jascha releases a music video that draws on Greek mythology to tell an epic story of time-travel and lost love.
The song, “The Future,” is the second single on Jascha’s album The Future Limited, which ventures into the realms of science-fiction and synth-pop. A haunting ballad with a driving beat, the song tells the story of a man who, traveling back in time to warn his lover of a coming war, discovers that the past can be just as dangerous as the future.
To make the video, Brooklyn filmmaker Naftali Beane Rutter staged an intensely physical shoot in Central Park last summer. He grounded the song’s time-travel story in a classic Greek myth, in which the great musician and poet Orpheus must walk out of the underworld without glancing back at the ghost of his wife Eurydice—if he looks back before they reach the world of the living, he will lose her forever.
“Since my childhood the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has haunted me, and I have always wanted to explore my own variation,” says Rutter. “The story is ethereal, but I wanted to mix a physicality into the ghostliness, to depict Orpheus’ journey as a grueling trial.”
“The opening scene where we emerge from the water—filmed at the crack of dawn in a Central Park pond—may be the farthest I’ve ever gone for art,” says Jascha. “But it gave us the effect we wanted: a pair of lovers emerging from the future to venture together into an uncertain past.”
“The decision to shoot the video in black and white was inspired by a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem about Orpheus and Eurydice: ‘Like silent seams of silver ore they moved as veins through the darkness,’” adds Rutter.
Jascha’s album The Future Limited, officially released on March 6, is now available for free download. His previous music videos include a science-fiction mashup and an animated adventure. Both were posted on Boing Boing and The Atlantic on release.
• The music video “The Future” goes live on YouTube on Tuesday, February 28 at 9am.
• The new album The Future Limited is available for free download at thefuturelimited.com. It will be officially released on iTunes, Amazon and Spotify on March 6.
• A press release for the album is here.
Jascha Hoffman is a songwriter and science journalist in San Francisco. His debut album A Cure for Sleep has been praised for its “deceptively simple, deeply weird pop songs” that earned him comparisons to Sufjan Stevens, Magnetic Fields and “Leonard Cohen without the attitude.” Jascha’s second album, The Future Limited ventures into the realms of science fiction and synth-pop.
Naftali Beane Rutter is a writer, director, and photographer. His feature length documentary TODAY was called “exquisitely made” and “one of the best films of the last two years.” He makes commercials, music videos, and feature films, and has collaborated with HBO, PBS, NOVA, The Wall Street Journal and TruTV. He is currently developing a narrative feature called La Marea, a ghost story about a man whose life is changed by a whale. Visit waterboundpictures.com to watch his work.
