Zoon van Snook - The Verge Of Winter

Just as we’re looking ahead to the trials and tribulations of British summer time, Zoon van Snook’s The Verge Of Winter has gone and put us in a very different seasonal frame of mind. In 2009, Zoon van Snook took himself off to Iceland to assemble some field recordings, the labours of which will be revealed on second album ‘The Bridge Between Life and Death’. The Verge Of Winter carries an appealing ruggedness: those xylophones reverberate forcefully and the potential for the piano and strings to take a turn for the quaint is knocked back by the snippets of howling wind and the later obtrusive siren calls. All this is captured in the video, which at times feels like you’ve stumbled onto a John Grierson documentary. Director Ívar Hollanders has shared his aims for the visual, so I’ll hand over to him for more thoughts:

“For me the title of the song The Verge of Winter means that life is coming to an end the final chapter in a lifespan, since winter is most often associated with the end of a cycle. I also feel that in winter there is always a certain memory, a memory of another time, summer, autumn and the first snowfall, but once winter has come these are mere memories. That is why I placed the man in the video. He is in the current state of winter but remembers a time further back, whether that is the verge of his own winter or someone else’s… I wanted for the medium to get the organic feeling of film but with a digital twist, like such analog technology as old televisions.”

Lo Recordings will release ‘The Bridge Between Life and Death’ in the UK on the 20th May.