Psychedelic sonics collide with digital trickery and 60 quarts of paint in the visually rich music video for Mwahaha’s “Rainbow Diamond,” exclusively premiered above.
The tectonic electro-pop track from the Oakland, California, band’s self-titled debut matches up nicely in name and inspiration with the head-trip clip, co-directed by Mwahaha band member Nathan Tilton.
“Some of the lyrics were written the morning after an all-night acid trip,” Mwahaha vocalist Ross Peacock, whose bald visage provides “Rainbow Diamond” with much of its canvas, told Wired.com in an e-mail. “I remember things looking gigantically small at the time.”
Tilton, co-director Josh Rauber and cinematography engineer Evan Rivera Lee compressed Peacock’s potent dosing into a surreal reel full of paint and pathos. The short take? It looks like a ’60s happening mashed through the iTunes visualizer.
“With deadline pressure and no budget, I pulled all of my resources together,” Tilton, whose brother Cyrus is also a Mwahaha member, told Wired.com in an e-mail. “I work at a paint store, so I dug through its discounted pile of mis-tinted paint, each one being a different color. I took about 60 quart cans to a basement in West Oakland, and one idea led to another.”
Tilton stayed away from plot, in respect to both Peacock’s trip and video’s open narrative format. The result is a complementary twin of Mwahaha’s musical debut, a record with shifting sonics that evoke everyone from The Dears and Deerhoof to David Bowie and Pink Floyd. (That last band’s iconic back cover for the uneven record Ummagumma is directly quoted in Mwahaha’s band photo.)
Screen the premiere video above and let us know in the comments section if you enjoyed Mwahaha’s weird ride.