OOFJ met in New York while Jenno Bjørnkjær was working on music for Lars Von Trier’s ‘Melancholia’. Their distinctive, exotic sound is the perfect fusion of South African vocalist Katherine Mills-Rymer dark romanticism and Jenno’s cool Danish precision – creating something simultaneously glamorous, nightmarish, and narcotic. Now, on the heels of their acclaimed Disco To Die To, the duo re-emerge with the mysterious Snakehips. The sound exists in this darker, Lynchian sphere but their new single also seems to suggest the light of day-glo escaping through the cracks. Snakehips conjures the groovy anxiety of rubbing up against a stranger and pretending to be a stranger to someone you know.
The video, which now premieres on NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION, is made out of a clip of Earl ‘Snakehips’ Tucker also known as ‘The human boa constrictor’. The clip is taken from the 1930’s short film ‘Crazy House’. Tucker who lived from 1905 to 1937 was an american dancer, flexible as a snake, acquiring the nickname Snakehips after popularizing the dance around Harlem music clubs like the Savoy ballroom in the 1920’s. The Snakehips dance dates back to southern plantations before emancipation. OOFJ allows for Mr Tuckers complete virtuosity to be ogled and then surprisingly they add images of ‘beautiful porn’, cropped to make the dancing of Earl to shape – shift and change to environs of women’s bodies. Mr Tucker dances in-between and in front of mouths, hips, breasts, legs and feet, hinting at the absurd pleasure of sexual fantasy and summer lust. The images hint at what the song almost climaxes to, ‘move your hand up my thigh…’ The complex and throbbing musicality and the velvet whisper, sighing of the voice.
Enjoy the video premiere of OOFJ‘s Snakehips below and ‘come on, move your Snakehips’. The single is out now via Fake Diamond Records.
Get the single in iTunes.
––
OOFJ