Nero Kane has recently released a video for ‘Mechthild’, the second episode of the short film directed by Samantha Stella that launched the album Tales of Faith and Lunacy, released last October.
The first episode was ‘Lord Won’t Come’; Kane and Stella were the protagonists of the short film that, following the cinematic concept of the album, combines American western landscape elements with iconographic elements of European religious culture to weave an algid and dark sonic and aesthetic psychedelia.
The lyrics of ‘Mechthild’, a visionary folk-noir story describing a love full of passion and sickness for God, are inspired by the writing “The Flowing Light of the Godhead” by Mechthild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth-century German Christian mystic, with a paragraph quoted at the end of the song. References in Nero Kane’s style, and therefore in the film’s aesthetics, can be found in the sick sound of Nick Cave, in the melancholy of Johnny Cash, in the insanity of Nico, in the darkness of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, in the desert territories of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, in the shamanic spirit of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and in the visionary border landscapes of Cormac McCarthy.
The track is a folk-noir ballad between passion and lunacy. It sees Stella’s vocals take the fore at the open alongside a hypnotic guitar riff that lulls you gently, pulling you deeper into the safety of the music.
