Lusine is best known for his abstract but highly melodic electronic music, and soon he’ll release the new EP Arterial. Now he shares Christophe Thockler’s video for the EP’s title track which uniquely plays into that musical contrast. With tight, dramatically lit shots of computer motherboards, chips, and other electronic devices that gradually drip blood, it feels both mechanical and organic, blending with Lusine’s track, which is choppy and mechanized until a bit of human voice drops in now and then. I was so fascinated by the video I reached out to director Thockler for some sort of a comment only to learn that the video contains absolutely zero digital effects. Everything was done using stop-motion animation built from about 7,000 pictures and live footage. The melting near the end was done with a heat gun, and even the credit sequence is shot entirely live on an old glitching computer. Oh, and some of that blood you’re seeing is real blood. Watch it below and read Thockler’s comments.

When Lusine came to me for a video for the track Arterial, I asked him if he had something in mind and he answered that he was thinking about blood flow and arteries. Perfect timing, because I really wanted, during several years, to make something a bit gloomy. I listened to this really amazing track many times during pre-production and slowly thought that it needed perhaps something more than just blood. The track is very electronic, cold, but at the same time there are many layers of warm sounds, ambient sounds that makes you feel things, there is something a bit human in them. So I tried to create something I call “electrorganic”: a mix of blood and human tissues with electronic components like LEDs and electronic boards. I wanted to make an intriguing video, where you don’t really know what’s happening, but you can imagine that some sort of electronic machine is powered by or producing blood.

One of the biggest part was to work with the lights to create different types of texture for the blood and play with reflections. A tricky part was also to wire the electronic components to power the LEDs, screens or small motors when everything was covered in blood. About the blood, be prepared… yes, there is (a bit of) real blood in the video. I went to a butcher’s shop and asked for some ox blood but I could only use it in a few sequences. I have a friend called Mathieu Baptista, who is a really great SFX make up artist who worked on movies like Noah or X-men : Days of the Future Past, who helped me to create fake blood with syrup and ink, the key thing is to add another color than just red or black, like a touch of green or blue in order to have something convincing.

Arterial is out 8/5 via Ghostly International. Pre-order it here.