In retrospect, yarn bombing is such a brilliant concept for a music video it's shocking no one has used it before.
Inspired by the guerrilla art/graffiti movement, yarn bombing is the practice of covering random public structures, at least partially, with yarn. Trees, statues and bike racks are all common unsuspecting victims. And then once it happened to a tank.
In San Francisco-based electro pop duo Seventeen Evergreen's new video for "Polarity Song," they take the idea to its logical endpoint--a secret, completely yarn-covered world existing inside of a West Oakland thrift store filled with creatures hungry to abduct everything they can find from our non-yarn covered world and cover them with yarn.
Simple, right?
Everything from a basketball to a View-Master to an exercise bike to an owl get savagely and adorably yarn bombed.
If you think that's not an initially terrifying and then joyfully rapturous experience, then you've never been unexpectedly yanked into an unfamiliar space and then forcibly covered with yarn.
The video was masterminded by the East Bay production duo Terri Timely, who have also made videos for Modest Mouse, St. Vincent and Joanna Newsom.
Despite what it may look like, all the knit work in the video was actually made by hand. The band told SF Weekly:
In the video what you see -- a lot of people assume it's just a bunch of CGI, there's no way somebody could have hand-knit all this stuff together. But they basically created this dream world, a sort of parallel psychedelic textile world of contrasting fabrics and beautiful patterns. That thing was 50 feet wide by 25 feet high. The stuff where you see the choreographed dance parts and then the live performance where we're there singing to this little congregation of tripped out dancers, that part was all done in their studio. The other parts were done in a giant thrift store in West Oakland.
The video was an instant hit online and quickly garnered more than 122,000 views on Vimeo. "It's always hard to gauge future reactions," band member Caleb Pate told Elle Magazine's culture blog. "I knew we made something good when the video was shot, and was triply surprised by the final edit."
"Polarity Song" appears on Seventeen Evergreen's Psyentist EP, which was released in November. The band is planning on releasing a full length follow-up on February 27th.