Richard Dawson & Circle – “Methuselah”Richard Dawson & Circle – “Methuselah”

Last month, the idiosyncratic British folk musician Richard Dawson announced a new collaborative LP with the Finnish band Circle. It’s called Henki — a word that loosely translates to “spirit” — and it’s described as “flora-themed,” inspired by various famous plants. So far we’ve heard one single, “Lily.” Today, they’re back with another one.

Dawson and Circle’s latest is called “Methuselah.” This one begins and ends with disquieting art-rock lurch, two passages apparently about Donald Currey, the geographer who accidentally cut down the oldest known tree on Earth in 1964. The middle of the song explodes into something altogether different, a sort of soaring proggy middle with tinges of old-school metal music. As with many things Dawson’s involved in, “Methuselah” is quite a ride.

The song also comes with a video directed by Samuli Alapuranen. Here’s what Alapuranen had to say about the clip:

The trembling stasis presented in the aesthetics of the music video for Richard Dawson & Circle’s song “Methuselah” appropriates the subjective time frame of the world’s oldest living organism, the bristlecone pine, translating that into a mould that better fits the human attention span. To illustrate time’s relativity, the video imagines and visualizes human motion as captured by the compound eye of arthropods. The seemingly immobile human artefacts caught in an Escheresque conundrum of provocative directionlessness evokes a temporal illusion in which the fly-like speed of the viewer’s visual senses reveals the fictional nature of our sensory perception. The flow of things is in essence static, rendering a stumble down the steps ominously immobile and virtually imperceptible. The visual choreography for the song was filmed in various locations, using the modern-day panopticon, the smartphone.

Check it out below.

Henki is out 11/26 via Domino. Pre-order it here.