PRESS RELEASE

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tAngerinecAt’s new music video “House of Shards” visualises a haunting victory over trauma. 07/10/21

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“tAngerinecAt is breaking down barriers and the time-space continuum.." – Alice Teeple, Post-Punk.com

 

Ukrainian/British non-binary duo tAngerinecAt are releasing a new single accompanied by their second ever music video, “House of Shards,” on 7th October. Both producers and seasoned multi-instrumentalists, Eugene Purpurovsky and Paul Chilton have recently been chosen for a Help Musicians award to release their next concept album, Glass, in 2022. “House of Shards” is the second single from Glass, based around Eugene’s personal life experiences as a neurodivergent person, severe trauma, acute poverty and Chernobyl disaster survivor, and a queer multiethnic refugee activist from Ukraine.

 

Directed by Ray Moody in collaboration with tAngerinecAt and based on a script by Eugene Purpurovsky, the video draws out the cinematic potential that many listeners have already noticed in tAngerinecAt’s music, culminating with a sequence of rapid cuts in which Eugene delivers a dizzying performance on the hurdy-gurdy, like a circle dance of uprising ending in triumph. He sings about confusion and disconnectedness, being caught in a dream and trying to find the way out – “lost in a maze of unbeknown parts, where is the exit? Too many guards.”  Eugene’s genre-bending vocal delivery, utilizing a wide range of techniques, hits just as hard as the thumping kick drum as the atmosphere grows in intensity. He moves from an almost angry hoarseness in the beginning, before soaring to purer notes in the second part of the song, accompanied by an effect-laden Carpathian bagpipe drone, and heavily delayed vocal echoes that circle around the stereo field similar to a ritual choir. 

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The song’s labored production spans post-punk and experimental genres, with hints of techno and even doom metal. Based on one of his dreams about a house in which objects from the past were mixed up with the present, the video is replete with symbols, containing traditional Ukrainian garments and photographs of Eugene’s grandparents.

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It is a ceremonial attempt to collect, in Eugene’s words, “fragments of personal and generational history into a single whole as a process of healing from trauma and a journey into the self.”