Padded Cell

My second commissioned music video for DC Recordings in 2008 came through Padded Cell, the duo of Richard Sen and Neil Beatnik. Their upcoming album was steeped in dark horror themes, folklore, and retro witchcraft aesthetics—an evocative blend of the macabre and the mystical. This eerie atmosphere shaped not only the album’s sound but also its visual identity, from cover art to promotional materials. The lead single, Word of Mouth, featuring the haunting vocals of Chloe Battant, would be the album’s first offering to the world, and it needed a music video that would live up to its unsettling, hypnotic energy.

The single’s artwork—a stark black-and-white image of a triangle with an all-seeing eye and two silhouetted legs—immediately set the tone. A distinctly Dadaist composition, it felt both symbolic and disorienting, as though it belonged to a forgotten, surrealist dream. Alongside this, early drafts of the album cover conjured a world of eerie landscapes: twisted, skeletal trees clawing at the sky, foreboding windmills looming over desolate fields, and storm-lashed nights ripped straight from the archives of classic Hammer Horror cinema. These elements provided the foundation for my visual approach, a gateway into an uncanny realm where logic dissolves, and only the symbols remain.

2018 - Word of Mouth

The Vision: A Dadaist Nightmare in Motion

The video follows our protagonist as she becomes ensnared in a surreal, flickering black-and-white dreamscape, forever chasing the enigmatic Retina Triangle. Is it a symbol? A deity? A portal? Its purpose remains elusive, but its power is undeniable.

She moves through fractured dimensions, slipping between the city’s shadowed alleyways and the windswept desolation of the countryside. Faces blur, time fractures, and ominous figures lurk at the edges of perception. Throughout her journey, the Triangle Eye is guided by masked, totem-headed seers—silent watchers who exist between worlds, steering her ever deeper into the Isosceles Dimension. Each crossfade pulls her further from reality, erasing the boundaries between waking and dreaming, sanity and delirium.

The visuals embrace the aesthetics of experimental cinema, drawing inspiration from Lynchian nightmares, German Expressionism, and the disorienting logic of early surrealist film. The result is an eerie, hypnotic experience—part horror, part fever dream, and entirely inescapable.

A collision of occult symbolism, cinematic horror, and experimental aesthetics, the Word of Mouth music video transforms Padded Cell’s sonic world into a living, breathing hallucination. Otherworldly, unsettling, and impossible to look away from, it lingers like a half-remembered nightmare, beckoning you to return.

The Sound: A Dark Disco Séance

At its core, Word of Mouth is an undiscovered indie anthem, a fusion of disparate influences forming something truly unique. 80s synths shimmer against eerie piano notes, while spectral saxophone lines drift through the mix like ghosts in the machine. Beneath it all, a bassline of pure menace pulses relentlessly, creating a feeling of suspense and unease. It’s a track that lingers, a hypnotic incantation that seeps under the skin, making it the perfect soundtrack for a nightmarish descent into the unknown.

Bringing the Vision to Life: A Surrealist Odyssey

I had an incredible time making this video. DC Recordings gave me a great deal of creative freedom, along with a modest budget, which meant I had to think resourcefully when it came to designing costumes, selecting locations, and developing the overall visual aesthetic. That challenge only fuelled my creativity.

As Padded Cell prepared to take their sound on tour, they had plans for a live dancer to embody the Triangle Eye entity on stage. The label had already commissioned a costume designer to create a convincing, wearable version of the figure depicted on the single’s cover art. When I saw the finished piece, I knew immediately that it would translate brilliantly to film. It also sparked a second idea—if The Triangle Eye was an entity, why not surround it with other supernatural beings, a whole gathering of enigmatic creatures?

That led me to dig into my own collection of carnivalesque costumes—handmade masks and outfits that my friends and I had crafted over the years for parties and performances. At the time, we had built up a pretty unique collection: goat heads, foxes, crows, fish, frogs, and other strange, pagan-esque creatures. The masks, all hand-sculpted, had a raw and expressive quality that fit seamlessly into the video’s aesthetic, evoking secret rituals and forgotten folklore.

Cinematic Inspirations: Chasing the Surreal

Visually, I wanted the film to draw upon the eerie, dreamlike quality of early experimental cinema. I started researching old German Expressionist films and the avant-garde works of filmmakers like László Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray, Hans Richter, Jean Cocteau, Maya Deren, and Luis Buñuel. Their use of light and shadow, distorted perspectives, and surrealist imagery inspired the techniques I would bring into the shoot—stuttering frame rates, double exposures, and high-contrast black-and-white sequences to create an otherworldly, fractured dreamscape.

The album cover itself became a major source of inspiration for the shoot’s locations, particularly its illustration of a looming, desolate windmill. We tracked down an intact, atmospheric windmill in Oxfordshire that fit the mood perfectly, its stark silhouette adding an ominous presence to the film. Other locations included graveyards, desolate alleyways, and sites featuring geometric architecture—places where triangles played a symbolic or visual role. One of the most striking was the British Museum’s modern rooftop, its glass-and-steel framework forming angular, hypnotic patterns that felt like a natural extension of the Isosceles Dimension.