PEEP SHOW: Hercules and Love Affair, “You Belong” (With Director’s Commentary!)

KRIS MOYES, clearly upset over his building blocks collection

By Andrew Parks

“I had an interest in forensic pathology,” says Kris Moyes, a Sydney-based director/animator who’s done videos for such artists as Cut Copy, Beck, and his brother‘s band the Presets, “Until I realized I didn’t have a high enough IQ or the balls to put up with death every day.”

While we can understand his aversion to corpses, Moyes’ innate grasp of color, movement and high concept storylines are far from feebleminded. Case in point: the following Hercules and Love Affair clip, which brings to mind a certain brand of early ’90s dance pop. We’ll let Moyes explain what we mean …

self-titled: Okay, so this video kinda reminds me of C + C Music Factory. And I mean that in a good way.
That was the point of reference, actually. I used a couple stills from “Gonna Make You Sweat” as a point of reference. The premise here is pretty conceptual. Basically, there are three points converging, giving birth to color. There’s the cave, which is the black point; the salt world, which is the white point; and there’s this monolith of salt crystals that are a combination of white and black. Once harmony is established between those three worlds, the birth of color comes. That’s represented by the dancing monks in the reflective world at the end.

Why did you make [DJ/producer] Andy [Butler] look so evil?
Does he look evil?

Well, his eyes are glowing quite a bit.
Yeah, he receives a charge from a plasma ball and that sets a series of events in motion. Like when he opens his eyes, a bottle of lightning comes out and causes a crack in the cave, which is also the floor of the salt world. That gives [singer] Nomi [Ruiz] and the voguers access to the salt world. Then they do their interpretative dance and he pulls out a remote control–that holographic game he has. That introduces [singer] Kim-Ann [Foxman], who starts playing this glass harp in sync with the music. The vibrations of that awakens the monolith, which assembles itself. The cascading crystals fall into that and the harmonies of the glass harp make the salt change shapes.

What was their reaction when you said the reference points where C + C Music Factory and a really heavy sci-fi film?
I actually sent them a diagram that was three circles with lines coming out of them, meeting at one point. Then I had a picture this Swiss artist did, with light going through a prism and reflecting all the colors of the rainbow. [Laughs] I said Andy is this monk that lives in a cave, Kim-Ann is his assistant who plays a glass-harp and Nomi is the leader of a pack of wolves that happen to be backup dancers.

I don’t know how they looked at it and said, ‘Let’s do this.’ It’s pretty conceptual and not explanatory–just a lot of weird scenarios existing side by side.

Kris Moyes’ current project is a 60-second online clip for the new Lacoste line Lacoste! (Yes, with an exclamation point.) He’s filming it in Paris at the moment and promises an eye-popping theme of “Youth + Music = Dance,” which is basically self-titled‘s motto.