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Christina Vantzou Spawns Ghostly Twins in Her NSFW ‘Shadow Sun’ Video

Christina Vantzou‘s usual instrumental palette (swooning strings, feather-light keyboard flourishes) has traditionally suggested a nodding-out neoclassicism — like string quartets playing Brahms on the very verge of opiated slumber, maybe. But for her third studio album for institution of abstraction Kranky she’s changed things up a bit, relying on interstellar synthesizer lines a little more to turn the sleepy pieces both a little more cosmic and a little more kosmische.

Lead single “Shadow Sun” functions as something of a bridge between past and present, wrapping gothy ambience in the tidy technicolors of her gasping synthwork, an otherworldly meld and a suggestion to just sit and sink rather than drift off. That approach has always been mirrored in Vantzou‘s work as a visual artist. She has a tendency to give the familiar a sense of spectrality, which she embraces wholeheartedly on the self-directed video for “Shadow Sun,” streaming now below. There’s rotating naked bodies (and as such is NSFW), creepy twins, and flapping fabric, it’s earthly, but disembodied at the same time. Watch it as you wait for No. 3, due October 16 on Kranky.