Chris Yencha, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture 1

In contrast to my typically bland blog entry, I thought I'd try to attack one of these required-text entries in a more interesting way.


I present to you The Swim by Liminals. [Friendly Noise]

Liminals is a new Swedish techno-pop duo made up of Anna-Karin Brus and Tomas Bodén. The group released an EP about a week ago which included this The Swim. The EP, Hearthand, may be one of the greatest contributions to Italo-disco this year.

To stay relative to the topic, I was reading an interview between the duo and Friendly Noise Magazine concerning the band's decision to split apart from Differnet to produce more disco-oriented techno, the emerging new mediums of music distribution and the effect that they are projected to have on the business for Liminals, and hypnotic, minimalist composition within the genre to name a few; however, the most important part of this interview in relation to this blog is when the interviewer asks how Liminals decided upon their name.

Och namnet Liminals? Jag sökte på ordet och fick ett antal träffar som handlar om ”liminal beings” inom mytologin.

Både människa och djur (hybrid), både människa och ande, både levande och död (spöke), både människa och grönsak (The Green Man), både människa och maskin, både människa och alien (Spock i Star Trek). Någon gränslandsvarelse som ni känner lite extra för?

Tomas Bodén: Människa och maskin passar nog oss. Vi ser oss gärna som någonting mitt emellan, i ett gränsland. Sång och röstljud kan samplas och förvrängas så att det inte går att känna igen, bli ett instrument bland andra. Slutresultatet blir någonting organiskt. Någonting mitt emellan akustiskt och digitalt.

Anna-Karin Brus: Fast det där med blandningen mellan människa och grönsak är ju extremt roligt.

The interviewer (Mattias Jonsson) essentially asks where the name, Liminals, came from and then suggests a few strange examples of liminal beings from throughout pop-culture (Spock- human and alien and, the funniest, The Green Man- human and vegetable.) Tomas replies that human-machine fits the band's character most appropriately. He then goes on to explain that he sees the duo as something in between, in a borderland. The type of sound that the band strives for is somewhere in between organic and digital in the way that they distort sampled sound and voice to a degree which is unrecognizable, but still wholesome and vividly conscious of life.

The video itself seems to represent liminality, as suggested by Victor and Matthew Turner, authors of Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, through a number of different means. The silhouettes of men practicing yoga seem to be frequently interrupted from achieving a state of complete absorption in their art by the constantly pulsing music and flashing of distracting scenes of falling water, amongst other motifs. The falling water is an especially interesting symbol as it represents a liminal state in which the water is within the process of falling and is never at rest.

Eventually, visualizations of the men practicing yoga die down and are predominantly replaced by a swimmer stretching in preparation for a swim. The last scene of men practicing yoga before the chill-out at 3:37 shows one man making arm movements in his practice which resembles swimming. The chill-out focuses almost solely on the swimmer and images of violently moving water. After the chill-out, the man practicing yoga seems to disengage from his liminal state as he becomes too distracted. The last scenes of him show the man blocking his ears from some sort of audible distraction in a last-ditch effort to remain in his meditative state but fails. The rest of the video focuses almost solely on the swimmer and how his meditation has kept him within the liminal state that he has been maintaining since the beginning. His state is compared to the previous success of the men practicing yoga just before he begins to focus solely on the water during the resolution.