Video: Celebration - "Honeysuckle Blue"

Celebration's Hello Paradise - Electric Tarot is just days away from it's official vinyl release, which means the full LP is almost available for free digitally online. One of the last tracks to be unveiled comes today via the full moon, and is called "Honeysuckle Blue". In addition to offering the MP3, YVYNYL and Friends Records are premiering the new video for the song created by Baltimore's own Miranda Pfeiffer.



"Honeysuckle Blue" represents the Alchemy card in their Electric Tarot deck, which is depicted up top in Katrina Ford's painting. Miranda Pfeiffer was asked to illustrate the themes that come with this card, and she chose to do that by highlighting the relationships we have between two separate urban environments. Here's Miranda's take:

“This animation was made using a stop motion process. While the Soft Cat video capitalizes on freeze-frame images juxtaposed with fluid animated movement, in this animation every hand-drawn frame is included so that all of the every motion is fluid. I used many different mediums to get a range of blacks from the colors. Some of these materials were ball-point pen, sharpie, graphite, chalk, and sum-i ink. I drew on both sides of frosted papers like vellum and tracing paper to get additional differentiation among the shade. This added a depth from the paper in the image.

The song itself was inspired by the tarot card, Alchemy, which illustrates two seemingly absolute opposites merging together. The video compares two aspects of Baltimore, interior and the exterior spaces. Because of the desolate nature of this city, a lot of social interaction occurs inside. For example, at night, there are places in Baltimore that aren’t safe to walk through alone. Because Baltimore has very few open spaces that are accessible and inhabitable by all its dwellers, residents often form special relationships with their apartments, with large-converted warehouses, and with interior spaces in general. The couple in the video is an average example of this kind of citizen.

Still, the interiors and exteriors reflect one another. Though seemingly opposite, the little room in the animation is similar in nature to the shots of the exterior city. In the video, all of the exterior shots show some form of plans made by humans that didn’t turn out like society imagined. The roaches reflect a sense of wilderness inside man’s habitat and man’s failure to truly plan a city. Simultaneously, the roaches traverse both the inside and the outside…the only creature able to fully do so. Because of the nature of the exterior spaces, the inside is also somewhat barren and scary. The female character cuts her hand when sawing a log…presumably one that came from the outside. Time is a theme. In the interior this is shown through the many clocks on the wall, ever ticking. In the exterior, the moon’s changing state represents another kind of cyclical time.

There’s a lot of charm in this world. It’s not an overwhelmingly bad place. Even the ugly bugs when viewed with a little tenderness are actually pretty endearing.”

Celebration's Hello Paradise will be available on vinyl with CD at the end of January.