Sxokondo Stain "Flesh and Sky" With Bloody, Biting Hardcore (Music Video Premiere)
The music video for “Flesh and Sky Part II” is, very suitably, red. As the final track from Swiss hardcore group Sxokondo‘s recent Flesh & Sky EP, a work inspired by the extremely violent film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a bloody color palette is thematically appropriate. Beyond that, though, the events of the music video and the song itself create an incredibly tense, strained atmosphere of painful suspense that the crimson hues reinforce.
Depicting a victim forced to eat food laced with nails, the footage intermixes the flat stares of onlookers with the torturous consumption, and the band’s blackened-at-points hardcore combines sharp, nasty riffs and throat-shredding screams with periods of plainly uncomfortable softer grooves, clearly just a prelude to further suffering. Watch the video below:
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At its loudest when depicting the victim attempting to eat the, uh, dish, “Flesh and Sky Part II” contorts and twists through abrasive riffs, with loud drum hits filling in the gaps between notes. It then seems to pause, daring us to continue watching/listening, slowing down the tempo and toying with ominous cleaner melodies before launching into another dissonant death-dealer. As the track reaches its zenith, both the video and the song grow increasingly frenetic: blastbeats and tremolo riffing now accompany the gut-wrenching vocals, and an honestly disturbing strobing effect makes the video a bit hard to watch before the track returns to its regularly scheduled hardcore beatdown to wrap things up. It’s a powerful track and a powerful video that drives home a grim message with effective audiovisual collaboration—though, I would suggest you avoid eating while watching it.
The band comments:
Flesh & Sky is our second EP and takes its name from a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was a writer, poet, journalist, screenwriter and director, best known for the infamous movie “Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom”. The whole concept of the EP is based on this movie and explores the idea that most of our world is subjected to a system that crushes the weakest without leaving them any way out. The systemic, political, and moral violence is then transformed into physical violence in the end.
The video is partly based on one of the scenes from the movie, where a young girl is forced to eat food filled with nails. In the video, a group of people watch the scene passively, as a man wanders around them, to observe them in turn and contemplate the violence they are witnessing.
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Flesh & Sky released April 17th, 2020 via Division Records.
