Son Lux – the LA & NY-based band of Ryan Lott, Rafiq Bhatia and Ian Chang – today share the stunning music video for “All Directions” from their new album Brighter Wounds (out now on City Slang).
The video stars Emmy Award-winning actress Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black, Stronger) and actor Tom Cullen (Black Mirror, Downton Abbey), with cinematography by Steve Yedlin (Star Wars: The Last Jedi). It was directed by frequent collaborator Nathan Johnson, and produced by Made Shop in conjunction with RocketJump. Johnson, a film composer (Looper, Brick), visual artist, and director (Lucius), previously collaborated with Son Lux and Maslany on the video for “You Don’t Know Me,” off the band’s 2015 LP Bones.
Watch the video below.
Drawn to the song’s “pathos of horror and hope simultaneously bubbling under the surface,” Johnson explains, “I began to see images — a curtain blowing in the wind, the early hope and confused despair of a close relationship, a mountain trail, an axe…and eventually, fragments of old Biblical stories that live on the edges of our collective consciousness. These stories tend to be elemental; disturbingly dark. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his son, only to stop him at the last moment. We see cycles of violence, sins of the fathers passed down through generations. All of this started to coalesce with the themes of the record, and, to a greater degree, with the recent landscape of our country.”
Johnson continues, “It’s been incredibly disheartening to watch the self-proclaimed bannermen of righteousness tripping over themselves to excuse egregious violations of morality in the name of a religious endgame. This is one of the potential dangers of any ideology: if we have an unshakable certainty that our end justifies any means, we open a door in ourselves to shocking cruelty and degradation. Of course this isn’t new: there are countless examples in history of zealous men who believed they were carrying out the will of God to inflict violence on others. But in thinking we’re hearing from God, we may in fact be breaking with reality. In making this video, we wanted to explore a simple question. Is it possible for a father’s core humanity to fracture his constructed certainty? In a history of violence, might there be a break in the cycle? Instead of a wound of aggression, a wound of sacrifice. A Brighter Wound.”