Watch: Man Power - The Tourist
British born, Mexico based DJ and producer Geoff Kirkwood is the one they call Man Power.
A producer of many a decadent jams, the mysterious moniker initially served as an anonymous project for Kirkwood, offering a platform to explore the limits of genres. However, adding an IRL layer to his identity has done nothing to stifle his dedication to the musical cause. In fact, we covered his jittering and spaced out remix of Kiwi's Atlanticus not so long back.
Returning to the fore with an EP on ESP Institute, Man Power has delivered an exceptional video for the synth-driven cruise of the title track, The Tourist. Produced by Pauly Barton and Lewis Bonner, it's a mysterious slice of action that sees an official and determined looking fella with a briefcase making his way through forests and lakes, before drifting off into the distance over a pretty seriously looking bridge.
We weren't 100% sure what was occurring, but thankfully the man himself was on hand to shed some light on the situation. Turns out it's quite complex, and the NB note from Man Power comes across as quite poetic:
Man Power: "I asked my friend Paul Barton and his film making partner Lewis B to come up with a video with a none explicit narrative. I’m really excited by things with an interpretive nature that’s completely down to the observer, and I think Pauly and Lewis really managed to achieve something that totally nails that idea. It’s something that manages to raise a lot of questions, and creates a situation where you feel compelled to fill in the narrative blanks yourself. It achieves this in an incredibly simple way, which I think is the absolute key to why it works. With that said, I’ve been asked specifically to provide a narrative so I’m just going to go ahead and make one up:
In the video we see a man, lets call him Daniel, but his name’s not important.
Daniel, like many of us, is a man of diminished dreams who has been battered by the realities of life, which continue to betray themselves to him on a daily basis with ever increasing alacrity. As a youth he was tipped as a talented pinsetter, yet the rise of the modern automated bowling alley, coupled with his deeply religious parents belief that all games other than “Mumbly Peg” were the work of Satan, meant that by 1991, at age 11, his dreams lay in tatters. His adolescence was remarkable only for it’s lack of notable achievement or of failure. Daniel rapidly began to feel like a supporting cast member in his own life story: demeaned by his peers, spurned by his idols, and marginalised by his community. Daniel’s only relief was in transporting himself to a fantasy world. Not having the means to buy books, nor the gumption to join the library – Daniel would voraciously memorise the names of novels and their authors, as displayed in his home town’s book shop.
He would loudly profess a deep critical knowledge of a varied lexicon of fiction, without ever having read a word of it. On summer days he would actively seek out people in his local park, merely to argue with them about the relative merits of stories he didn’t even know. Far from growing out of it, this peccadillo merely entrenched itself and became a defining feature of his adult life.
Er, then he found a briefcase… and had a walk through some fields to a bridge.
NB.
The actor's name IS Daniel.
We had an argument about a book a couple of years back.
We were in a park.
Turns out he hadn’t even read it.
I’m incredibly petty.
This is my revenge."
'The Tourist' EP is out now on ESP Institute (buy).
