Closing the loop
Twelve. I put a real weight of pressure on myself for this one. “The Blinding” was called “Black Mountain” in the early demos, and I originally pictured a man in the middle of mountains, slowly getting overtaken, something close to the 360-degree video we’d built for the previous EP. I didn’t want to just redo that. With the full visual vocabulary I’d built up across this whole project, I wanted to close the story instead.
The loop closes here. Where the first track in the series opened with the sun and moon appearing, this one is closer to their disappearance: that same sun-moon turns into a kind of black hole, something circular that swallows everything, which fits a line straight from the lyrics: “You are in the blind.”
A childhood habit
I wanted to build in something I used to do as a kid, something you really shouldn’t do: I’d stare directly at the sun. It’s maybe part of why I wear glasses now :o There was this glowing halo that would spin around it while I did. I kept doing that until, I think, around the time of a solar eclipse in the late nineties, someone finally convinced me it wasn’t a good idea. What I remember most is the burning sensation, the halo obsessing me around the edges, and that’s the sensation I wanted to translate here.
This one leans hard on my graphic-design instincts again. It works like a poster or an illustration: the sun becomes a beacon-like circle, and the lyrics gain intensity as it goes. It starts all black, and then the red wakes up and starts turning around it.
Everything falls apart
The silhouette reappears just to disintegrate into fragments, and by the end, whether it’s the elevator, the beacon, or the man himself, everything comes apart. I don’t know if that’s really how I picture the end of the world, but it’s how I chose to close out this listen through the album, because to me, this whole thing has always been a bit of a love story, a life story, a story of passing through. It starts with something forming; it ends with that same thing deforming. What makes this song powerful to me is that sense of encirclement, closing in tighter and tighter until it’s almost suffocating by the end. That’s how the elevator finally breaks apart, and how the song ends.
One more thing worth mentioning: through this whole project, I’ve been listening to the album alongside its thirteenth part, “The Lost Tapes,” included with the pre-order, which is exceptional. If the album does well, and these visualizers do well, I’d love to build one for that track too. It runs close to ten minutes, it’s a real journey, and it would let me pull together everything I’ve built across this whole series into one piece.
Spotify Canvas loop created from this visualizer
That closes the twelve. The full series lives on the N U I T _ Alt Real case study, where the finished visualizer for this track will go live once it’s cut.