Boys Noize and Pilo Share Dark "Cerebral" Video

This year, Berlin producer/DJ Boys Noize celebrates the 10th anniversary of his label Boysnoize Records. Last month, he released the mini-album Strictly Raw Vol. 1, featuring guests including Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs, Tiga, and, on the track “Cerebral”, Pilo. Now, LIL INTERNET has directed an apocalyptic video for the track. 

It’s a collage of human-made disasters, street fighting, collapsing buildings, and riot scenes, all witnessed–or controlled–by a girl wearing a brainwave-reader headset. Check it out below, along with Lil Internet’s intriguing description, and scroll down for Boys Noize’s world tour dates.

I got the song, and it was dark and called “Cerebral.” “Dark cerebral thrillers” is the sub-genre Netflix algorithms used to recommend to me based on my viewing history, so that’s what I decided to make.

Google Cardboard had been recently released when I was concepting, so VR was on my mind. I also often think about theories Baudrillard posited in Simulation and Simulacra, about hyperreality and the “copy replacing the original.” Originally, the simulated world of the internet had to be colonized, so to speak, with ideas and imagery from the real world- it’s a simplification, but the flow was reality making a copy of itself in the virtual. We are beginning to see that flow reversed, where things from the simulated world of the internet are colonizing real life. An example I use a lot is the rapper RiFF RAFF. Here’s a character that’s a product of the virtual, through music videos, reality TV, and Worldstar, that colonized the real life original. If you’ve ever met RiFF RAFF, you know that he’s not playing a character- the online avatar colonized whoever the real person in that body was entirely. So I began thinking of this reversal of flow, virtual reality, and in a wider sense the simulation hypothesis- the theory that our world is nothing but a simulation, perhaps run by more intelligent humans in the future, or perhaps even extraterrestrial in origin.

EEG readers use brainwaves to control computers. They make inexpensive EEG headsets that people can wear and use to “think” the answer to simple problems presented on the computer, without giving any sort of physical input. Thus, my video concept was born- a disarmingly young looking girl uses an EEG reader to imagine these nightmarish scenes of violence and brutality, an aggregation of everything wrong in the world right now. But the flow of the simulation has been reversed, and her imagination, this simulation of violence, is actually not just a simulation after all…

Boys Noize:

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