FADER PREMIERE
The Gen F-profiled Melbourne duo HTRK released their slowly burning third record, Psychic 9-5 Club, this spring. They recorded the LP partly with Zebrablood mastermind and former Excepter member Nathan Corbin, who first introduced me to the band back in 2011, when he made a moody black-and-white clip for Work (work, work) track "Bendin." Today, he's unveiling a 11-minute-long short film he co-directed with Tony Lowe for Psychic 9-5 Club cut "Chinatown Style," taking us on a gentle but subtly squalid dérive through a series of New York City interiors (a photo studio, a restaurant, an underground dance club), each of which feels equally mysterious and hypnotizing in its own right. Grab a cop of the album via Ghostly International, and read some words on the video from Corbin below:
"I worked as a delivery boy in Manhattan in my early twenties. It’s an intimate way to experience the city. The delivery is a conduit into an extended, physical exchange. It can be erotic and psychedelic; the repetition of ‘opening‘ in a city full of guarded skyscrapers and locked doors. You float invisibly, drifting from one ambiance to the next.In NYC there is fluidity between everyone. You’re constantly 'encountering' people. Always entering. The energy can vary wildly with successive shifts from light to dark to light like yin-yang. You found luck! You find yourself in a utopian center: a Psychic 9-5 Club.
People are dancing.
I chose to work with people I didn’t know for the most part..so that our interaction was new, innocent..like a delivery.
The cinematography concept was crucial. Shoot with a wide angle lens to create that innocence. You see everything so the ‘gaze’...the obsessive and voyeuristic part of looking is reduced. The eye of an open heart."
