Parisian meta-post-rock outfit LOST IN KIEV finally return with their long-awaited 3rd album and most astounding work to date, Persona. 7 years after our 2012 interview HERE, it’s my pleasure to give you their new video for the title track above!
Raw and driven, yet oozing with thick synth textures and a great sense of melancholy and drama, Persona sees LOST IN KIEV further expand their own idiosyncratic take on cinematic, contemporary post rock.
“The main challenge with this record was how to write more direct and shorter post rock tracks with the same intensity as our previous, longer compositions“, guitarist Maxime Ingrand explains, „and also finding the right balance between traditonal post rock, the addition of synths and machines and the texts for the film“.
LOST IN KIEV have always been one of the few truly suggestive post rock bands: they do lack a vocalist, and yet their music is prosaic, cinematic reflections and stories.
Written and conceptualized to be reflections on humanity in a fictional futuristic context where artificial intelligence is fully implemented into everyday life, Persona does not impose any sort of political or moral position on the topic: LOST IN KIEV create fictional characters and let them talk, breathe, cry and live through intimate stories and cathartic experiences on a screen behind the band, while they perform live…
Post rock has ever since its beginnings shown an affinity to the use of speech samples, and has borrowed voices from movies or speeches by celebrities like Iggy Pop as in Mogwai’s „Punk Rock“ or random lost souls as in GY!BE’s „Blaise Bailey Finnegan III“. LOST IN KIEV take this tradition to the next level, by writing their own genuine storyline, and making their own movie to their album. Ever since 2016’s Nuit noir, the band has recorded their own spoken words, as opposed to plagiarizing from movies. During their live performances, these voiceovers are synchronized with video projections showing actors who interprete the different voices on screen. An inverted soundtrack of sorts, or musical fiction, always tinged with realism in a striking and emotionally intense way.
Persona has been written as a reflection on humanity, in a futuristic technological context, where the A.I would be fully implemented in everyday life. Persona does not impose a position on the topic, Persona results from a desire to create a futuristic fiction through the prism of intimate stories, with characters with singular lives and sometimes tinged with realism. We wanted to create a new kind of ambience for us with some analog & digital electronic sounds and samples, a mix between post-rock as we already made but with a true soundtrack movies ambiance and a bit of trip-hop music style.
Yoann Vermeulen, video director and drummer of Lost In Kiev, commented::
‘Persona evokes the creation of a new intelligent being, similar to ourselves, created by a robotics company. The human resemblance is so impressive that we can say that it is the “spark of a new world
The clip narrates the creation of this first being.
A shot of space, the infinite, juxtaposed with images of microbiology reminiscent of the birth of life on Earth. Gradually, small objects begin to reveal the subject in more depth. Finally, a body emerges from a 3D printer. The universe is white, immaculate, like a technological fantasy.
The video then turns into dark colors and reveals the sordid aspect of the business. The company logo that appears states “Make your future more human”, an ironic slogan which is referenced on the track Pygmalion.
The shots multiply, the rythm accelerates and ends with a rewind of the genesis. The shot of space becomes interrupted by a glitch. This sequence is a mirror to the first scene that evokes the birth from the void (space).
In the last shot, the CEO of the company is publicly revealing the successful creation of what is the spark of a new world.’“
