Naomi Punk‘s excellent 2014 LP Television Man is out now on Captured Tracks, and this week the Olympia-based post-punk trio released this new video for their title track. Directed by artist/photographer Robin Stein, it features a brilliant collaging of what appears to be mostly found footage. The video opens with abstracted shots of a mirror, and it uses the movement of a fleshy, pink light source in the shots, as well as rhythmic, rapid cuts, to create a wiry, visual tension. Thematically, “Television Man” seems to deal with self-image, and the ways in which culturally derived (read “corporate”) media serve as a voyeuristic loop, ultimately twisting our own sense of identity. Stein echos this sentiment by appropriating images of beefy and tanned bodybuilders, contrasting their rippling forms with that of an aspiring muscle man, who seems to be caught in his own feedback-filled hall of mirrors!
