| Creativity isn’t just a feeling, emotion or idea. It’s an expression, a form of being – the sparks of emotion, ideas and nervous energy jumping across live wires. It’s the sense of purpose you feel when you filter the environment around you into something people can consume and connect with. It’s the way a simple video can provide thousands the connection to understand. It’s the genius of a humble melody, which can inspire.
Matthew Neumann says it’s a way for him to make sense. It’s self-evident in Neumann’s back catalogue of work – the multiple releases from ScotDrakula, his photography portfolio, amounting music video clip credits and zine collection.
Neumann’s style was cultivated in Saskatchewan, Canada and manifested when he moved toAustralia and began ScotDrakula in 2011. His new art project of Cosmic Rays was prompted partly, by the short hiatus of ScotDrakula in 2015 and his slight obsession with synthesizers. Siphoning any spare energy into the project, he “wanted to try something starkly different from previous projects and wound up with a some kinda fucked up mix between the Talking Heads, Bauhause and Mike Jones” Neumann explains.
Finding what used to be destructive, now gives him a sense of purpose, Neumann’s latest video clip sidles up with “Teen Bank Robbers on Heroin,” a track taken from Cosmic Rays’ debut EP,Yeah, Cool, released digitally in July 2015.
Featuring good friends, Ashley Bundang (of Totally Mild & Zone Out) and Toby Marsh, the film clip was shot over the course of two intense days across Thornbury, on a $70 budget – which “went towards pizzas for everyone and a Myki card for the tram scene” – and with the assistance of partner, Georgia Friend. It follows the heartbreaking optimism of being a fledgling, down out broke, falling head over heals in love with someone and the recklessness that seems, at the time, pretty reasonable. It’s “kinda scary, depressing and fucking amazingly wonderful.”
While there is a new ScotDrakula record on the way, sink your senses into the latest offering of creative genius, Matthew Neumann. |
