"The new music video for Coursing Through Veins/Days Bleed by Veda Rays, is a beguiling whirlwind of surreal images that return, dreamlike, in the same pattern as the philosophically captivating lyrics and beautiful vocals."
-- Mary Wild, Freudian cinephile and creator of the Projections lecture series and co-host of the Projections podcast
Veda Rays' Coursing Through Veins/ Days Bleed video
Raffi Iniello, editor
“Coursing Through Veins/ Days Bleed” is the latest video from Veda Rays’ most recent LP, Crucial Fictions, which was released back in October of last year. The slow-burning track traces an uncommon arc as it seems to depart from its form two thirds of the way through, letting the road lead where it may. The rest of the song from that point rides out much like the night driving scenes of its visual accompaniment. That is not the only place in which the imagery seems to sync with the lyrics and music. The jittery wallpaper pattern in the intro fittingly captures the feeling of subliminal chaos and dread percolating just below the calm surface. Luminous trails from road signs, street lamps, lightning and stars reflect through a rain-pelted windshield, rending veils of second sight as Stark sings of “astral landscapes woven from suns.”
Though understated and left to the imagination of the viewer, a sense of existential horror is grimly evoked. The red paint dripping down the clear plastic covering the old television monitor, though obviously not meant to look real, still suggests suffocation, bloodletting and death.
And what happened in the strange camper? I guess we’ll have to do some active imagining and ask the nebulous creature of light which emerges from the fabric of reality toward the end.
Maria Joanna Bohemia:
Like the video for our song “Rose Likes Leather,” a fair amount of this video was filmed in my grandmother’s guest bedroom. We spent the start of the pandemic at her fairly modest home in my fairly modest hometown, but were still able to draw a lot of inspiration from our very remote surroundings.
There was a period where we were toying with the idea of bringing zombies into the video’s narrative in some way, but that didn’t pan out. We ultimately went with a bloody television instead, which is hopefully a much less played out horror visual at this point. Watch closely enough and those eerie back roads may contain some frightful images as well.
James Stark:
At its core this video essentially documents us leaving a Walmart strip plaza parking lot, then proceeding to drive around on a dark, rainy night in a small rural Pennsylvania town. The rest is left to the viewer to form their own interpretation. I will say that, like the other videos from the Crucial Fictions (Oct. 21) release cycle, this one began as nothing more than an extension of the home movie format, very much capturing us in mundane circumstances, in the midst of our day to day lives. Going on from there, we found the process of allowing it to reveal itself bit by bit quite interesting. It was like an extended discursive meditation, tracing a chain of association as each new link arose from the subconscious, yet never really knowing the literal subject.
Coursing Through Veins/ Days Bleed (lyrics)
In the blink of an eye you were gone
It was raining that night, I was driving you home and we
Stopped along the way
Straps were undone
An endless rewind, elegantly absurd
As the days
As the days bleed
Coursing through veins/ in the cells of it’s blood
We knew every line before the fables were spun
We’re just two of a kind
Under the streetlights above
And the vault of the sky hung over everyone
Now the days
Now the days
Now the days…
In the dark of the night I held on
To a rope that was high
An infinity over those astral landscapes
Woven from suns
I’d come unstuck in time
I heard the gunfire reverberate
Now the days
Now the days
Bleed
Coursing through veins in the cells of it’s blood
We knew every sign before the fables were spun
We’re just two of a kind
Under the streetlights above
Swerving over the lines
We hadn’t even begun to erase
Now the days bleed on
The days bleed on
This air feels wrong
So, wait, hold on
Wait, hold on