SUN

We look the sun in the eye with music in our ear. The music is by Attwenger. The track entitled SUN, a litany sung in a broad Upper Austrian accent, tells about a hot day upon which one stares into the sun until everything turns red and the glowing heavenly body resembles a pistol or an eye. The video made to accompany this dynamic and vivid number is by Siegfried A. Fruhauf, who has followed up the solar eclipse in REALTIME (2002) with another planetary study.

SUN – which is not necessarily typical for the genre – consists of nothing more than a dozen static shots with little or no movement. The main subject of both the video and the song´s lyrics are identical. But this is not immediately obvious: In a slow reverse zoom the white glare filling the picture is gradually revealed to be the sun´s ball of light surrounded by a green-ish yellow blaze.

But the images betray little, and the economical editing follows the stumbling and driving rhythm of the music. The image makes minor deviations from the lyrics and plays off them in unusual ways, such as providing a blue counterpoint when the song´s text deals with the colour red. The image remains a projection surface: The round white object could be the bass drum which begins playing later.
It resembles the light at the end of a dark tunnel – or that of a pistol barrel – then becomes a thermal image or a reflection on a watery surface, black as night. We look the sun in the eye and engage in free association.

(Isabella Reicher)

Translation: Steve Wilder