Back in April we wrote about Mal Not Bad, the recording project of Los Angeles-based visual artist and musician Mallory Hauser, and her forthcoming EP Continuous Short Feature Film. As the title suggests, the release offers eight songs and a supporting twenty-minute visual accompaniment which aims to present an uninterrupted stream of images. First single ‘Oven’ was “a slow, foggy track,” which denatured as it progressed, “more sluggish than panicked as dissonant tones scramble the once-pillowy sound,” the surreal video capturing a mood we described as “a nightmare where the terrible is happening but you can hardly move.”
Latest single ‘Sports’ turns its attention to dispiritedness, drawing the analogy of an athlete going through the highs and lows of competition to ask how one continues to push forward when exhaustion and disappointment have sapped all will to carry on. “‘Sports’ came during a time when I was struggling to find a way out of a stagnant and desaturated cloud,” Hauser explains. “Feeling depleted and constantly losing any bearings on which way was up or down.” Through a subdued, sluggish sound of acoustic guitar and negative space which eventually rises into a chaotic climax, Mal Not Bad conjures the sensation of running on a treadmill amid a raging snowstorm, a disoriented experience of constant motion which ultimately leads nowhere in return.
Well I try reachin’ out
Can’t catch my breath I feel so spread thin
I can’t keep up
How can you breathe in when there’s nothing left to give?Left it all behind
Laid it on the line
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Made in collaboration with director of photography Seannie Bryan, the self-directed video is part of the wider Continuous Short Feature Film video project which takes inspiration from the likes of Norman McLaren and David Lynch. For ‘Sports’, the footage captures a spontaneous sense of community on Super 8mm film, finding whimsy and melancholy within the textures of the everyday.
Continuous Short Feature Film is out on the 19th August.
Photo by Jacob Boll