Premiere: We exclusively unveil the new video for Karen Vogt’s (Heligoland) track ‘Spirit’, off the shimmering album ‘Haunted Woodland Volume 5’.

Earlier this month I reviewed the new solo album from Paris-based Australian artist Karen Vogt, part of the much vaunted band Heligoland. Today we are proud to premiere the video for the track ‘Spirit’ off the album.

The track has a spiritual, dreamy tone as Vogt’s yearning vocals enter above echoed, delayed crisp guitars – layered and as delicate as a silken veil floating in the sky. The repetition of the title creates a deliciously hypnotic effect, building up a heavenly chorus.

The video incorporates the imagery and themes that inspired the tracks and threads throughout the album: mysterious trees that appear like a hallucinogenic episode. Shot by Vogt and assembled by Ben from the label Wayside and Woodland Recordings, the video is suitably immersive and dreamy and is influenced by the booklet that comes with the album. Vogt says:

I filmed the six trees along the river path that were central to my interpretation of the Haunted Woodland theme. It’s a simple video, but it’s important to me that any video I use for my music is original, made for that purpose by either myself, my friends, or the filmmakers I work with. I don’t like stock footage as it feels impersonal.

I’d been taking photos of the six trees throughout the seasons that Ben at the label (Wayside and Woodland Recordings) used for the booklet. I love how he incorporated old maps of the area to give the artwork the feeling of a catalogue that had been lying around in the woods for years, sun-bleached, faded, and worn by time. It captures an atmosphere of fading memory that is flickering and dissolving in the light.

When I filmed this video on my phone, it was Winter, which kind of adds to the haunted feeling. I sent the footage to Ben, who made some beautiful edits and treatments that softened the look. Ben gave the video a dreamlike, impressionistic quality and adjusted the pacing to better match the tone of the track.
I don’t see the video as telling a story – it’s more of a visualiser to enhance the song’s eerie atmosphere. That slow upward gaze at the treetops invites a kind of quiet wandering of the mind, which is at the heart of my take on the Haunted Woodland series.

Vogt interviewed Ben and explored how the video was developed:

Can you tell us a bit about the Haunted Woodland series?
The idea for the Haunted Woodland series came about in 2009 after a discussion with Rob (the half of epic45) who was co-running the label with me back then. The idea was for the artists involved in Wayside & Woodland to each choose an area of woodland they felt they had a particular connection to, or simply found interesting or evocative in some way. The remit was wide and resulted in a mixture of approaches including folklore (real or imagined), local legend, paranormal encounters, philosophy and socio-political statements.

The booklet that accompanies Karen Vogt’s release has a faded, textural, and ghostly feel. What techniques did you use to give this feeling of time having passed and there being something a bit spooky about the place?
The visual aesthetic for the artwork was established right at the beginning of the series, when it was being created and assembled by hand. For the return of the series, due, initially, to practical reasons, I decided to upscale the original design. I wanted to keep the same lo-fi nature but go further into the details, using techniques I’ve learned over the last few years. Thus, I decided to layer over old paper textures and give the whole thing an inky, almost xeroxed, look. Like a pamphlet from some undisclosed ‘other time’.

The video you made has a dreamlike quality – what choices did you make in terms of color grading, pacing, and transitions to evoke this atmosphere?
I wanted the video to feel in unison with the booklet so overexposed it a little, slowed it down and tried to match the monochrome tone to the inky pages. Overlaying two images allowed the imagery to fill the 16:9 ratio and also added a sense of dreamlike distance from the subject, as if you are viewing it through some kind of split lens.

The result is an evocative and transfixing piece of art:

‘Haunted Woodland Volume 5’ is essentially a votive to Vogt’s perception of her surrounding environment, beautifully sculpted and formed from guitar, vocals, and a few effects pedals, with bass on one track, and a couple of field recordings made near the six trees. It is a haunting and beautiful album and available through the link below.

Feature Photograph: Jolanda Moletta