Petra Glynt’s “Fell In A Hole” is a colorful look at a dark reality [Video]

Petra Glynt (aka Alexandra Mackenzie), self-proclaimed art punk from Montreal, has announced the release of her self-produced/recorded debut LP, and with it she has shared the single "Fell In A Hole". This Trip will be out on October 22 via Vibe Over Method, new label from producer Damian Taylor (Bjork, The Prodigy, Arcade Fire), who also mixed the album. A veteran performer in the local scene and a longtime collaborator with Doldrums (she has contributed to both his music and artwork), Glynt has been a Montreal/Toronto favorite for some time.

Glynt's visual aesthetic, as you can see in the video (co-directed by Mackenzie and Lesley Marshall), is strikingly vivid and stimulating, while her music sounds like it comes from a future age in which humans have returned to nature (whether by choice or not is something for us to interpret). Add on her activist perspective and her work achieves a poignancy that can't be ignored: she shines a bright neon light on the dark realities that we love to leave lurking in the shadows.

"Fell In A Hole" is one of the most accomplished displays of her singular dynamic. Set in a hyper-realistic corporate office (the sixes-only clock is a nice touch), the video features her in the role of an evil CEO, decked out in a tropi-colored suit with matching rollerblades, rainbow eyebrows, and nefariously pointed lipstick. Her cronies, equally vibrant, roll around the office conducting business as usual while the rest of the world seems to be up in flames. In her thunderous, gooey "vibr-alto" as I'd like to call it, she sings of commerce's unabated greed as tribal rhythms bellow down below, drilling turbulently toward the ground while accompanying the words "We fell in a hole". The blown out style in which this troupe is twirling around the room, with campy expressions on their lavishly painted faces that only show concern for what is in their microcosm, conveys the level of absurdity our narcissism has reached in a gorgeously ghastly manner. I've always struggled with the idea of how to effectively meld art and politics, but if there's one way to do it, Petra Glynt has it down. It isn't subtle and I don't think she wants it to be; with the time for subtlety long gone, she is what we need.