Gus Davidson - 'Sobey's Crocuses' (video review)

February 22, 2021 - Pop Quiz Records

Gus Davidson is a musician and producer based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. A self-proclaimed “prairie electronic artist,” his music is lush and minimal, organically composed, instrumental, and filled with velvety synths and subtle, playful beats. He teamed up with video artist VJ-PG13 to craft a music video for ‘Sobeys Crocuses,’ the tender closing track from his 2020 self-titled album. True to the song’s title, the recurring image throughout the video is a stop-motion bloom cycle of crocus bulbs in a pot tucked into a corner of a home kitchen with a bunch of bananas and a croton. These crocuses melt in and out of a wide variety of found film imagery like a fever dream—urban parks flanked by buildings, waterfalls, garden plants, vistas, crashing waves on the shore, endless prairie land, a person rollerblading on a rooftop, a woodland stroll, and a dragonfly on a leaf, to name a few. With the addition of such visual richness, what seems at first to be a small, intimate homemade audio-visual meditation on the experience of living with a purple houseplant blossoms into a wider flower (pun intended) whose expansion shows us a view of human condition from a larger scope. A scope where we can see that, even sequestered from exposure to the elements in our man made boxes with our domesticated flora and fauna, and sequestered from our animal instincts by the self-awareness of our frontal lobes, we still remain tied to the cycles of the natural world. We call the irony and laugh at the word “profound.”

Aside from the crocuses, most of the imagery in ‘Sobeys Crocuses’ is found footage from discarded VHS tapes, rendering it appealing for those of us craving the aesthetic of cathode-ray tube television sets and the blurry colors that happen on the lower clarity of old video footage designed for home use. These blurred colored edges are exploited in the video as a paint palette. The crocuses are a stop-motion that Gus Davidson himself created for VJ-PG13 to bounce off of. The entire experience has a lo-fi appeal, an authenticity to creative expression that the world of corporate marketing seems to have been sweeping out of artists of late. I find the loose playful approach wholly rejuvenating. The song repeats a melodic synth phrase over and over again, on top of what sounds like faraway toy organ chords, and it never gets old. The melody is nostalgic like our saddest happy memories, things that float tenderly in the distance, that make us feel strange in our awareness of them. Feelings that are strongest when we are half awake or half asleep, when we’ve dropped the baggage of the day and are existing present in the past. Observation of a laugh-sob. Obsession with a complicated emotion. Repeating an evocative sound over and over again like we did when we were young and found something we really liked about life. 

The visuals in the music video seem to be a formal exploration of boundaries, of lines that separate one thing from another, be it a transition, a wall, an optical pun, or a split in the screen. For example, at 1:10 the arm of an old digital rendering of a discus man aligns with a desk lamp in the scene transition from man to fancy apartment circa 1995. At about 1:25, a shot of a bowling alley is literally turned into the action of a bowling ball. At 1:34, the crocuses flank a shot of lettuce in a garden, leading you to consider the positions of right, left and middle. That lettuce then fades away into a shot of two sister buildings, one on the right, one on the left, as the camera pans from one to the other. The buildings become apples at an open air market around 1:53, with a sharp divider between the green and the red that splits the screen at an angle. What follows is a literal split screen at 2:00, two landscapes divided down the horizontal middle by a diagonal, spliced together in a duality that can’t exist anywhere but imagination or synthetic space. 

This duality peaks in the collage around 2:25. Nature scenes are layered over each other, with a waterfall’s soothing momentum in the middle. Polygon shapes are overlaid on top, functioning as a sort of stained glass window. They shift in color like shifting natural light, giving architecture to the living tapestry behind them with the austerity of a cathedral. Reverence that sets the viewer up for humor as it all melts into a kaleidoscope frame for the final shot and punchline—one where a house cat, allegedly named Sobey, eats the crocuses. It caught me completely by surprise that the life cycle I was ruminating on all along was one where crocuses bloom in a pot in the home and are eaten by the cat when they are finished. We think therefore we are. And what we think is really funny. Those are indeed, Sobey’s crocuses. Not ours. I’m going to laugh-sob myself to sleep tonight. ☔