“The idea for a music video emerged during the pre-production of our third album Ruinenwert. To stay relevant is to engage in social media. The idea at the time I deemed impossible to produce but the idea of a music video festered in my brain until the pieces fell into places. We had developed archetypal characters for Ruinenwert and I was planning a photo shoot to actualise them visually. At the same time the owner of our demo studio purchased a wooden boat that would fit what I had in mind.

My family summer house is located between two ravine lakes in Virrat, Central Finland and I have lived there for extended periods of my life. Thus I had all the locations in my mind and furthermore the mysticism of the lakes had always inspired me. When the establishment Lepomäki (Hill of Rest) was built an ancient wooden boat was found in the clay sediment and a sacrificial stone circle with it. That Shamen or such holy men had ventured out there to die is the notion I entertained in my youth.

JUMI is an audio-visual production group we had established a couple years back. JUMI is the motherword for God in the Finnish language as well as our version of the bug represented by the egyptian scarab. It also means stuck in something both practically and in an abstract sense.

Our lyricist shining A. came up with the text for Desert Nosism and our bassist and guitarist Sandh and Termuthis came up with the song a year prior. The song had the perfect structure for a short movie: a three-part structure with long and atmospheric beginning, escalating to a climatic end.

With such things in mind we held a mushroom-fuelled planning session between the JUMI-workgroup and some of the actors in the video in March 2019 at the locations. We walked along the creaking ice into the darkness and came out different men.

Casting had already been done on the preliminary sessions concerning the main parts but it continued until late August. Fellow band-members, from John the Baptist and Vesper Kennings as well as couple of old friends filled the blanks. Staging and clothing began in May. The shooting began in the start of June. During the height of summer we filmed five sessions at the lakes and three on the ground not including reshoots. Long days with very little margin for error! Nailing a roadkill to a cross in heavy rain in the deepening night is not a vision which will leave me anytime soon… The editing was done in Hanko, the southernmost town in Finland. Yet again long days and movies for the inspiration during the day and editing and single malt whiskey through the nights.

When asked what I would like to convey to people with this I would say see the thing and figure it out yourself. If pressed I would say it is three-fold:

The first spiritual aspect is that nature is an enemy if you don’t have an interactive relationship with it. Human nature is the same.

The second spiritual aspect is that decay & death are a great part of life; Not something to be shunned and swept away under a rug but not something to be glorified either.

And third I don’t care much for political topics but If lines are to be drawn this video is a side-note to the current environmental hysteria. What the video says the nature will still be there when the society crumbles and probably some of us will be there too”.