The Bicep music video directed by Mark Jenkin
If you’ve seen the cinematic creations of Mark Jenkin, you might not expect him to be a fan of the UK electronic scene. The Cornwall-born director is perhaps most well-known for his 2019 feature film Bait, which fused the traditional with the experimental to explore social issues around a Cornish harbour village through hand-processed film.
Even a short description of Bait doesn’t seem to set Jenkin up as an ideal contender to direct a breakbeat music video, and yet, his 2020 collaboration with Bicep proved to be a perfect fusion of creativity. Leaving behind fishing villages and black-and-white visuals, Jenkin took on the task of bringing Bicep’s pulsing track to life with accompanying visuals.
The Bicep track, which featured on their 2020 record Isles, initially began as an ambient piece until the duo stumbled upon a particularly interesting sample. “One day, we picked up an amazing, recently released record called Beating Heart – Malawi,” Matthew McBriar explained to Genius, “The vocals and polyrhythms of ‘Gebede-Gebede Ulendo Wasabwere’ stood out. They were captivating.”
Suddenly, the song found a new focus in its vocals and the duo built “the rest of the track around them”. A second sample came from a Bulgarian folk record called Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares, which they picked as they felt a connection to “the mysterious chanting, and felt like it had parallels to the Celtic folk we grew up hearing”.
The shots that make up Jenkin’s accompanying video for the track are nothing special. They flit between images of natural imagery – trees, mud, leaves, flowers, shells – always returning back to a shot of a woman’s face. Though his subjects are fairly simplistic, it’s how Jenkin has manipulated the video that perfectly captures the atmosphere of the piece it accompanies.
The images are overlaid with different coloured filters and glitching, jittery effects, matching the skittish soundscapes of Bicep’s track. As the song begins to pick up, an image of a face becomes a glitching, inverted image of a woman standing, arms out, in a field. The shots of rocks and shells begin to move and stir. Even the moon starts spinning as if moved to dance by Bicep’s beats.
It’s a straightforward video, but one that encapsulates all the beauty, culture and life Bicep infused ‘Apricots’ with. It doesn’t adhere entirely to the rhythm, nor does it pick out the influences of Bicep’s sampling or Celtic folk roots, but it’s a perfect fit for the track nonetheless. In its lack of specificity, it allows viewers to paste their own meaning onto the song.
Watch the music video for ‘Apricots’ below.
