Text by CLOT Magazine
Soft as Snow‘s new single, pierced., from their intimate third full-length album Metal.wet (Beacon Sound, 2024) debuts with a visually arresting video crafted by Guynoid. Known for her fluid blend of beauty and the grotesque, the visual artist brings a fresh narrative to the duo’s haunting soundscape, capturing the essence of their experimental pop sound.
Having previously released music through Infinite Machine and Houndstooth, Soft as Snow—comprising Berlin-based duo Oda Starheim and Øystein Monsen, the evolution from these earlier releases reflects the duo’s commitment to pushing boundaries and exploring new artistic territories, culminating in a sound in Metal.wet that is uniquely their own while resonating with contemporary influences. The album showcases an intricate blend of analogue synthesisers, samplers, and live elements, creating a rich tapestry of intimate and expansive sound.
For the pierced. video, the duo collaborated with Guynoid, a net-based multidisciplinary artist who combines classical training in figure sculpture with procedural 3D modelling and texturing techniques. She describes her vision for the video as an exploration of disintegration: With this video, I wanted to paint an interpretation of a sequence showing a form losing its wholeness. I thought the model I worked with evoked Botticelli’s Venus in some poses, so I envisioned a classical beauty rendered in marble, formed and unformed into constituent chunks of raw material, like a statue being carved in reverse.
The imagery serves as a metaphor for transformation that parallels the themes in Soft as Snow’s music. As the duo unfolds their intricate sound, the visual landscape also moves fluidly through concepts of corporeality and metamorphosis.
Guynoid reveals that using TouchDesigner, she captured video of a digital avatar puppeteered by Oda’s singing, dividing that footage into nine regions and processing them into 3D geometry that can be arranged like a flattened Rubik’s cube. In TouchDesigner, I focus on building dynamic systems, like engines, that I capture footage of rather than manually arranging every frame.
The creative synergy between Soft as Snow and Guynoid has flourished over the years, evolving into an instinctual collaboration. The duo recalls meeting her randomly at a Puce Mary concert and being immediately drawn to her work. There’s a lot that is hard to put into words and left unspoken, yet she seems to have an intuitive understanding of what we’re working with. They are particularly enthralled by the many shapes that Guynoid’s work takes; it morphs and glides between beauty and the grotesque, forming questions of corporeality and gender but also moving beyond, they note, aligning perfectly with the lyrical themes of Metal. Wet.
Soft as Snow have also been collaborating with the visual artist for their new live show, which they recently presented at the Robot Festival in Italy. As a teaser, the duo shares that the visuals present a ritual going slowly awry, relating to creation, perverse self-actualization, and the potential for abjection as the price of desire. Through processes of carving and milling, bodies and non-bodies emerge in a state of metamorphosis, slipping and spitting into rituals of becoming.
