Joi Noir make a break for the light in the lyric video for their new single Celeste — premiering exclusively on Tinnitist.
Shot on the streets of Rome using subtle reverse cinematography, the international post-punk duo’s latest artful clip finds singer Olga Gallo moving backwards through waves of tourists and roaming the historic city in search of personal enlightenment.
“The song encompasses the celestial, the divine, the earth and humankind,” says the band, which also features guitarist Igor Plotnikov. “Did God create man or vice versa? It is about the relationship between all these things.”
Celeste song shares its name with the band’s recent full-length — recently featured here as a DIY Discovery. Though it does not appear on the Stephen Hague-produced album itself, it’s available as a digital single.
Hailing from Russia, Gallo and Plotnikov met in Pointe-Noire, Republic of Congo – hence the Noir in their moniker – before decamping to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia where they conceived and recorded the outline of the Celeste album.
Olga originates from Balashov, a very small town in central Russia, dominated by the scarcity of pretty much everything except alcohol (as a substitute for food) and her father’s belt. Here she discovered artists like Jello Biafra, DOA and Bad Religion although her real love for music was awakened by Pixies’ Bossonova album. “It wasn’t punk rock”, she says, “but somehow I loved it.”
In contrast, Igor’s childhood was spent in Tyumen, Western Siberia, birthplace of Irving Berlin. At 14 he lived off bottles of vodka stolen from moving trucks, at 16 he enrolled at university in the midst of the Siberian punk explosion, before winding up in a mental institution two years later.
At this same tender age, Olga had moved to “the crazy city” of Moscow, before relocating to Barcelona, then Africa and Malaysia and back to Barcelona again where she resides today. Together these disparate, perhaps incongruous, geographical but essentially human elements make up Joi Noir and their sound, which echoes great bands of the post-punk era (and several from more recent times) — including Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, New Order, Bauhuas, Eurythmics, Garbage, Florence + The Machine and plenty more.
Watch Celeste above, watch their previous video for Used to Be below, check out the rest of the album on their DIY Discovery page and connect with them via their website, Facebook and Twitter.
