Following the announcement of his east coast album launch shows, Marcus Whale today unveils the long form video accompaniment to his forthcoming record, Nether, out on July 2 via Blue Void. WATCH HERE+ PRE-ORDER LP HERE.

Comprised of the title track, ‘Unborn’ and forthcoming song ‘Hide’, the visual component of Whale’s latest album is a scry for the records ethos. An extension of Nether’s thesis statement that considers the power of ephemerality and the dissonance between two opposing worlds. The opening sequence text barrels against toiling bells, boiling with references laid from the album’s accompanying Notes on Nether booklet.

The stream of single words against a blank screen lay a harrowing, enigmatic scene for the album ahead – a descent into the underground. A creature of the deep appears, a doubled body filmed across the 1.4km Otford Railway Tunnel bellows, before the muddied figures ascend the slopes of the Blue Lake quarry in Plenty Gorge on Wurundjeri-willam Land. Against the drumless trance of ‘Hide’ they collapse before a blazing sunset.

Enhancing Marcus Whale’s enduring collaboration with director Tom Denize, tasked with applying his interpretation of beauty and clarity within today’s medium. “Tom Denize’s art has been the most central influence on my thinking when making the music for Nether,” Marcus shares. “One of his photographic works – a mud-splattered figure over an untouched slab of concrete, shot from above – hangs in my living room, and has haunted me throughout the making of the music for Nether. Tom often talks about the Barthesian idea of the “punctum”, a detail in the image that isn’t meant to be there, like a crack in reality. This muddied figure in Tom’s work felt like that crack, a creature of the underworld sucked up to the surface for a brief moment.”

WATCH: Nether Album Visual

Whale continues, “Asking Tom to make both the cover art and a long form music video for the album elaborates on that spark of inspiration. I was thinking about how Derek Jarman made long form music videos for The Smiths and Blondie in the early 80s. Jarman as a magical weaver of charged, queer images in his film work is a huge figure for both Tom and I. In a similar way, the collision of Tom’s world-making and my music feels like a perfect way to tune into the mud and filth of another world beyond our reach.”

For Denize, the mire heavy influence is an expansion of his recurring creative inspiration; “Mud has been a fluctuating motif in my practice for the last few years. I’m interested in how it can function as a residue of a place and or moment when it’s carried away by someone on the bottom of their sneakers or hem of their jeans. Often tied to the act of cruising, mud becomes somewhat of a substrate to the moments those places can hold. When Marcus approached me with the concept for the album there was an immediate confluence in our practices that felt special and beautifully serendipitous, much like the kinds of experiences tied to my thinking about mud.”

Today’s album visual ties together ‘Unborn’, a musical reflection of the Nether’s underworldy narrative and ‘Extra Life’, a personal excavation of Whale’s connection to performance. Of the forthcoming album, Marcus wonders “what it sounds like when what’s below the ground reaches up out of its borders and speaks its infernal voice.” Deconstructing the human and its ‘negative’ – if ecstasy manifested itself vampirically, Nether forms the figure of a zombie.

Writing to the culture of the underground, queer desire, colonial pasts and presents, Nether is a record that rattles with instrumentation, fighting against nescience, delirium, and emotional madness; what Whalecalls “the surface world and its norms that attempt to repudiate and exclude.” Musically set to enamour fans of Kelela to FKA twigs, with influence from the film O Fantasma, the cues that form cruising and Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock 94, Marcus Whale presents the depth of his creative passion.

Indicative of his decade long creative practice, spread as wide as electronic music production, experimental and improvised performance to composition for stage, screen and classical musicians. Whale recently announced a series of live performance launches for Nether, taking to Sydney and Melbourne in late July. See all tour routing details below.