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Ocean Districts Premiere “Funeral Parade” Video

Posted in Bootleg Theater on March 21st, 2019 by JJ Koczan

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More than seven decades later, humanity is still coming to grips with having split the atom. The capital-‘b’ Bomb and its literal and figurative fallout comprise the theme of Estonian instrumentalists Ocean Districts‘ self-released second album, Doomtowns. Like the prospects for humanity’s survival over the longer term, is something of a melancholy affair, but like a painting on a cave wall, its cry into the void would seem intended to endure past whichever of the various impending collapses we’re rightly terrified of this week. The video for “Funeral Parade,” which is the fourth of the five inclusions on the release, works with footage from the 1982 documentary The Atomic Cafe, which centers around the US governments’ efforts to downplay the effects of — as the Ferengi put it — irradiating our own planet, whether through propaganda or other means. You’ll hear references to “duck and cover” in “Funeral Parade.” My mother can tell you stories about doing drills in school hiding under her desk in case Russia dropped the Bomb.

Clearly, madness is nothing new.

But, like the 4.5 billion-year half-life of uranium 235, madness isn’t going anywhere. As might be inherent to an instrumental band, Ocean Districts never seem overly preachy or critical in their perspective — would be a challenge without lyrics — but certainly in “Funeral Parade” and the more languid “Survival City” before it, or opener “Doom Town” or the chug-and-drift of “The Trinity Gadget,” or the heavy post-rock wash of “Castle Bravo” that follows to close out, the message comes through plain nonetheless. It may not be the catastrophe du jour of our times — that’d be global warming; keep up — but it sure continues to be unfathomable by my little tiny brain how anyone ever thought introducing nuclear tests and, you know, bombs, into the planet’s biosphere was a good idea. Inquiring minds, devastated landscapes and billions of tumors want to know.

And by the way, I’m not trying to make light of nuclear weapons as a social issue. It’s fucking insane. I mean that. This month, my country was like, “Yeah whatever,” to an arms treaty with Russia. It’s not this shit went away when the “Cold War ended.” Tell that to MOABs in Iraq or any number of North Korean missile tests. Meanwhile, the singular shame of actually having dropped a bomb in an act of aggression — let alone two? Yeah, that’s something particularly American. The list goes, sadly, on.

But hey! Here’s a video premiere.

Have fun with it:

Ocean Districts, “Funeral Parade” official video premiere

Official music video for “Funeral Parade” featured on “Doomtowns” EP. Listen and buy: https://oceandistricts.bandcamp.com/

The track title “Funeral Parade” is a reference to Operation Plumbbob, a series of controversial nuclear tests conducted in 1957, at the Nevada Test Site, with the purpose of understanding the effects of a nuclear blast on civil and military properties, as well as on the average soldier on the battlefield. Conducted with the participation over 16,000 U.S. military personnel, the series released some 58,300 kilocuries of radioiodine into the atmosphere. Some of the studies done in its aftermath showed that exposure to radiation during the series was the cause of thousands of cases of thyroid cancers and leukemia, particularly among the military personnel involved.

Video was shot and edited by Martin Kaljuorg https://www.facebook.com/mkalvisuals/

All archive footage used can be seen in a 1982 documentary film Atomic Cafe.

Ocean Districts, Doomtowns (2018)

Ocean Districts on Thee Facebooks

Ocean Districts on Instagram

Ocean Districts on Bandcamp

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